WITH a population of over 220 million people, Pakistan has apparently the lowest literacy rate among South Asian countries. The phenomenal progress of China, our economic partner, was mainly owing to its education policy. From a 20 per cent literacy rate in 1950, it is 95pc today.

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill 2012 for children between the age of five and 16 was to become law after assent by the then President of Pakistan. It is without strict implementation so far.

In fact, the primary law should have been passed by the very first government in 1947.

PTI published its ‘white paper’ in December 2015 on the Punjab government’s poor performance in the education sector, emphasising that education had not been the government’s priority. Instead, it said, mega projects were under taken to gain political mileage.

This was because uneducated and powerless majority was useful for an equally uneducated but powerful ruling class. Illiteracy is the basic problem behind all our woes. This can be considered an overstatement, but there is no doubt that progress requires an educated and skilled workforce. Pakistan has over the decades experienced a steep fall in educational services in terms of quality and quantity. The reason is a low allocation of funds for education and scarcity of resources, apart from commitment at the administrative level to bring tangible improvement in education sector.

Rapid population growth also played a negative role. The bottom line is that the federal government and the provinces are not fulfilling their constitutional obligation to send every child to school.

In order to benefit from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project, an education emergency should be declared and the federal and provincial governments should allocate at least five per cent of budget for education in future with a provision of minimum a one per cent annual increase in subsequent budgets.

Mahmood Dadabhoy

Karachi

Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2019