LAHORE, April 6: The government is working on a plan to inject Rs70 billion every year into the education department for development works alone besides its annual budget of Rs33 billion.

This was stated by Punjab Education Minister Imran Masood while speaking at the first session on the second day of the two-day conference on “Issues in education”, organized by the Kinnaird College in collaboration with the British Council on Sunday.

The minister said he would come up with the new programme in a couple of weeks as he was working on the project to acquire funds to redress the ‘chronic’ problems of the Education Department.

Being the biggest department, Mr Masood said it had 600,000 employees out of a total of 725,000 employees of the Punjab government. He said some Rs27 billion were being spent on salary component, Rs5 billion on non-development works and Rs1 billion on development works. He said almost half of 63,000 schools did not have basic amenities like latrines, boundary walls, drinking water and electricity, which not only hindered improvement in the enrolment but also contributed towards increasing dropout rate.

On the other hand, he said, teachers and students’ unions, protection of their rights,

E&D rules and other administrative matters contributed to slow down the pace of development.

“The matters cannot be streamlined with a magic wand, but only through a continuous planned method,” he said.

The minister said the general education had lost its importance in society as the graduates were not getting jobs.