Elusive quality
EACH year, the noise grows louder and the naming and shaming of public entities reaches its crescendo around budget time. The music sheet remains unchanged, the chorus: ‘cuts in development allocations in the social sectors’. ‘Cacophony’ is a better descriptor. However, what adds insult to injury is that, in keeping with tradition, the health and education ministries have failed to fully utilise even the minuscule allocations they received in the outgoing fiscal year, prompting the Planning Commission to admonish them and donors to protest yet another set of rollover requests from the relevant departments.
The development fraternity continues to lament that whatever little is allocated to human development mostly falls under the non-development or recurrent category, and very little, if anything, is left for ‘development’. While successive governments have not overcome the fiscal constraints, real or imagined, in increasing budget allocations to the social sector, the public discourse has also not risen beyond hackneyed criticism.
Isn’t it time to ask, recurrent as they may be, why salaries in the education department are considered beyond the pale of development? Yes, the proportion of administrative versus teaching cadres must be debated, but the debate should also expand to include questions such as, ‘what about monitoring and evaluation?’, ‘what about coaching support for teachers?’, ‘what about assessment systems for students and teachers?’
True, AI will play a role, but trained, motivated human resources can’t be ignored. Salaries and career trajectories that attract the country’s best talent must be considered as much a part of development as curricula, textbook content and design, learning aids, and training. The less said about civil works the better. Infrastructure is essential to ensure a safe, conducive learning environment, but boundary walls and rooms alone won’t foster learning outcomes, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities among students.
Education quality can’t improve without quality expenditure.
Education quality can’t improve without quality expenditure. No rocket science; it’s just another way of saying ‘bang for the buck’ or stretching the rupee. A low-fee private school in a small building with little to no space for physical training or sports still enjoys more parental trust than a large public school next door with some, if not all, facilities, even though it pays a fraction of the salary a public-sector teacher earns and provides almost no training. While one cannot regulate private schools beyond preventing exploitation, public school teachers can surely be supported to produce better learning outcomes for students. In the next phase, non-performers should be removed.
While discussing the quality of expenditure, when was the last time we heard of an independent audit of teacher recruitment, training, and coaching mechanisms in the public sector? What incentives are in place for those who perform well, and what disincentives can be implemented under the current lifelong job guarantee, which is assumed not only by teachers but also the judicial system? Try denying an erring teacher a promotion they believe their years of service warrant, or firing an egregious one, and the courts will issue a stay order and then revoke any proposed disciplinary action, with full payment of arrears accrued during the litigation.
We can create as many islands of excellence in this sea of inequity as we like, but we can’t address what ails our education until we adopt a systemic, holistic, and transformative approach to reform. This calls for collective leadership, with the choir led by the very children whose futures are at stake, and with the voices of their parents and communities heard.
People change systems. People must exercise their agency and stop voting for transfers and postings, or for petty dispute resolution at the revenue department or police station level. They must demand that party manifestos specifically address issues with far-reaching impact on future generations, and then hold their representatives, whether in the ruling alliance or in opposition, accountable. Responsive governance and politics require compromise; only a collective of citizens can ensure that these trade-offs benefit future generations rather than private gain.
While the enigma of what truly guarantees national sovereignty is unresolved, the demand for increased human development allocations must be paired with insistence on expenditure quality to ensure development effectiveness. A matriculate able to read, comprehend, and calculate at a level commensurate with 10 years of schooling is not too much to ask. If this cannot be achieved, budgets, whether recurrent or developmental, yield nothing but deficits.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2026
