At a time when there is a pronounced shift from the public to the private sector in the health and education fields, it is strange that the government doesn’t have much to say about these areas of national life.

Probably, the powers that be have already washed their hands off the education and health of the people of Pakistan. Thus, the federal finance minister, Shaukat Aziz, who introduced the budget in June 2001, betrayed a conspicuous lack of concern for the poor state of human resources in the country . He spoke of the multitudinous problems the country faces from the lack of resources to the growing level of poverty. But he did not appear to be overly disturbed by the malfunctioning of the social sector in Pakistan. It is doubtful that the situation has improved in the last 12 months since the last budget was presented.

On account of this calculated policy, these departments have not been receiving as many funds as they require to operate with a measure of efficiency and professionalism. Their need is massive on account of the heavy backlog of illiteracy and poor state of the health delivery system as well as the high rate of population growth. These basic facts are conceded by the authorities whose basic responsibility it is to provide primary education and basic health care to every citizen. Yet those in power prefer to involve the private sector in this fundamental task while gradually disengaging the government from the role it should have been playing in the uplift of the human resources of the country.

Education This trend has been visible for the last several years. In the federal and provincial budgets for 2001-2002 the education sector was cumulatively allocated Rs66.2 billion. This was an increase of less than five per cent over the sum shown in the revised estimates of 2000-2001. Incidentally, these had been scaled down from the budgeted amount. If cuts have been imposed in the outgoing year as well, the increase as shown in the budget document will actually be even smaller when the revised estimates are announced later this month in the federal and provincial budgets.

The development budget, which is vital for the expansion of the education infrastructure but has always been inadequate, received no better treatment in the budgets for 2001-2002. For the outgoing year the development expenditure on education was to be Rs6.2 billion. This was admittedly an improvement on last year’s funding but was still not sufficient to ensure the expansion of this sector.

This pattern is in line with the trend of the last several years. The expenditure on education was 2.6 per cent of the GDP in 1996-97. It declined to 2.0 per cent of the GDP in 2000-2001.

The bottomline is that the government is not doing enough for education. In his budget speech the finance minister had disclosed that “a prominent project is being launched by a group of overseas Pakistanis for voluntary health and education services throughout Pakistan, which will be funded entirely by expatriates while the government would only provide coordination and logistic support to them”. There have been sporadic reports of a committee on university reforms having made some recommendations. We have also been hearing about reforms in the school system and the madressahs. But at present no noticeable changes have taken place.

This is reflected in the poor literacy rate of the country. According to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2002, in the year 2000 Pakistan had 43 per cent illiteracy among the male population and 72 per cent among the women. These rates are appalling and only a few under-developed African countries have a worse record than ours.

With the responsibility of imparting education to the people being taken over by the private sector, illiteracy will not be eliminated as fast as it should. Education will not expand rapidly. The economics of the private sector in education never works in favour of the indigent classes. It is inevitable that an entrepreneur jacks up the fees of his institution and thus keeps away those who cannot afford to pay the charges.

Thus the Sindh government did the right thing by abolishing the tuition fees in its schools in the current fiscal year. The fees had been imposed under the Zia regime in the eighties. But how much will this measure really help? Only a small fraction of the students will benefit because the enrolment in government schools has been falling and the ratio of children studying in private schools is rising as the total strength of school enrolment declines.

According to the Economic Survey 2000-2001, there are 36,096 private educational institutions in Pakistan which account for 6.089 million students. Of these institutions only 4,000 or so are owned by NGOs, Trusts and Foundations, whose fees can be expected to be modest and therefore affordable for people with low incomes. All the other institutions are self-owned and can be expected to be charging fees which not everyone can easily pay.

The other tragedy of education in Pakistan is that corruption and embezzlement have ensured that a substantial portion of the funds allocated to this sector are skimmed off, leaving very little to meet the genuine needs. As a result, the education sector has been in a state of decay for several years now.

Health: The state of the health sector is in a way worse than that of education. The federal government and the provincial governments allocated Rs23 billion to this sector for 2001-2002. Since the government’s budget documents no longer follow a standardized pattern and many figures are missing — whether this is by calculated policy or a result of ineptitude it is difficult to say — the health budget figures for 2000-2001 couldn’t be obtained. But according to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2000-2001, the health budget for that year was Rs 24.3 billion. This indicates a fall in the health allocation.

The government’s apathy in this field hits the people harder. If they cannot afford to send their children to school because the fees are too high, they do not send them to an educational institution at all and let them grow up to be illiterate adults. But a person suffering from a serious and painful disease is obliged to seek medical help — be it from the doctor or the quack — because this becomes a matter of life or death.

The expenses of the common man on health care are enormous. Considering the exorbitant doctors’ fees, the prices of medicines and the charges of diagnostic tests, it is nigh impossible for a person with a modest income to obtain good medical treatment when he falls ill. The World Bank’s figures are again very revealing. While the Pakistan government spends 0.7 per cent of the GDP on the health sector, the private sector’s spending amounts to 3.1 per cent. The shift to the private sector has obviously been more pronounced in this field. What expansion has taken place in the outgoing year will be known when the Economic Survey is published. If last performance is anything to go by, we should not expect a substantial increase. In 2000 the number of hospitals and BHUs actually declined — by one in the case of the first and 14 in the case of the latter. There was an addition of only one Rural Health Centre and one Maternity Health Centre in the course of the entire year.

A country which sets little store by the health and education of its citizens can never hope to emerge as a powerful nation. The strength of a country lies in the strength of its people and not the power of its bombs.