Ehsan-ur-Rehman


You talk to any education minister of the federal or provincial government, any senior or junior official, and he/she will deliver a long and comprehensive speech about the importance of education for development of the country.
They will stress more budgetary allocations and call for long- and short-term policies for promotion of education and enhancement of the literacy rate. But who should do it all, is a million dollar question, and finding an answer to it is not easy at all.

After promulgation of the 18th Amendment and devolution of education to the provinces, the Centre and provinces have found an opportunity to blame each other for non-development of the sector in the country. However, this blame-game is not going to bring about any change in the miserable status of education in Pakistan. There has never been any good news when education was a federal subject, and there seems to be no good news in the near future when the sector has been devolved to the federating units i.e. the provincial governments.

The facts and figures showing the state of education in the country have never changed. According to official and unofficial (but authentic) statistics, the country spends only two per cent of its budget on education, compared with the regional average of 4 per cent. Experts say that country needs to spend at least 5 per cent of its budget to sustain the current level of population growth! Also, 33 per cent of our children don't go to school, and if 100 students enter primary school, only three are left by the time they reach high school. 25 per cent of government teachers, some of the highest paid government servants on average, don't come to work on a daily basis. On an average day, 25 per cent teachers in government schools remain absent. According to official surveys, 60 per cent of government schools have no electricity and 40 per cent have no water.

Also, Pakistan ranks 166th out of 173 countries in the UN Index of Education Systems worldwide. At the rate our population is growing, 350 million people will live in Pakistan by 2050 and we will be the largest uneducated working population in the world by percentage.

In the field of education, Pakistan has its international obligations also. Being a signatory to UNESCO's Education Programme, Pakistan is committed to achieving an 86 per cent literacy rate by the year 2015, as envisaged in the Dakar Framework of Action for Education For All.

However, keeping in view the past record of successive governments, it would be extremely difficult to even get anywhere near the target of 85 per cent literacy rate in the next three years. Educationists say if we continue to spend almost 30 per cent of our annual budget on defence and only around Rs. 30 billion on education, there is no way the nation could bring about any significant improvement in the literacy rate. To achieve the goal, the government would have to substantially increase its allocations for education in the federal and provincial budgets.

Recently, attending a talk show at a private TV channel, the representatives of the federal and provincial government of the Punjab, stressed the need for giving top priority to education if we want to stand among the comity of nations with respect. Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, which is in the driving seat in the Punjab, the biggest province of Pakistan, was represented by Ahsan Iqbal, one of the main leaders of the party. Shahnaz Wazir Ali, a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister and the chairperson of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), spoke from the federal government side.

Both of them spoke at length about the problems facing the education sector in the country. But there was no clue as to why their respective governments were not implementing all those suggestions they were presenting at the show. PM Adviser Shahnaz Wazir Ali shed light on how the state had failed to give education: how so many things were wrong with the education system, and how they were continually failing to address the core issues.

The other participant, PML-N leader Ahsan Iqbal also talked about the need to change the state of education in the country, and how we had failed. The PML-N currently has nothing to boast about except for laptops which the Punjab government is distributing among college and university students. Ahsan Iqbal also mentioned IT laboratories, the provincial government has established in schools to encourage science and technology. But he failed to mention that over 70 per cent of those labs are non-functional for various reasons, from non-availability of science teachers to the experts to maintain those labs. He had no answer to a valid question as to why the huge funds spent on purchasing laptops were not used to provide missing facilities in the existing schools and colleges, which would have benefited a larger number of students.

A participant representing the youth asked why those funds were not utilised for making a uniform curriculum in the province. The PML-N leader defended the act by arguing that provinces making curriculums would mean that there would be separate curriculums across the country, and that is why they were not doing it. However, the problem with that is equally crucial. One may ask why they cannot lead a consensus and develop a model by themselves. Even if accepted that different curriculums in different provinces are a problem, then was only a dissenting note in the 18th Amendment, which devolved education, against this devolution, enough? As leaders of the opposition, did not they have a bigger responsibility to ensure that that did not happen? It becomes obvious that there is a priority to attain political benefits and education obviously doesn't make the cut when time comes.

Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali, former federal minister for education, believes that minimum national standards in curriculum and textbooks were essential for building national identity. Speaking at a seminar recently, he welcomed devolution of the education sector to the provinces, but stressed the need for a federal role in the education policy and curriculum to foster national unity. He said that there had always been lack of funds and political will for education and asked the provincial governments to allocate enough money in the provincial budgets to the sector. He said that the provinces' share in the National Finance Commission Award had considerably gone up. And the provinces should also try to expand their resources to meet the growing financial demand of the education sector.

Other speakers at the function said that devolution of educational responsibilities to provinces may create short-term difficulties, but it would have far reaching positive impacts in improving standards and delivery of education.

Famous scholar and educationist Dr. Rasul Bakhsh Rais termed the 18th Amendment an expression of broad-based national consensus and said that it would strengthen Pakistan as a democratic federal country. "We should not be afraid of change; instead, we need to get lessons from similar experiences of other federations regarding distribution of powers and responsibilities," he added.

Despite all these wishes and high hopes, the question remains as to who would take practical steps to strengthen the education sector in the country?

There is no denying the fact that education is not an issue which will ever be solved by one party or government alone. It needs a multi-partisan consensus and consistency in implementation to be solved. Experts also say our education system is divided on lines of geography, class, income/wealth, medium of instruction, cost, syllabi, curricula and gender and these differences manifest themselves in differentials in access, dropouts and in the quality of education that is imparted. And existing differences in educational provision will, inevitably, create even bigger differences in future.

Until and unless the federal and provincial governments join hands, own this vital sector, and also engage private sector positively, the problem of education cannot not be solved on permanent basis.

-Cuttingeedge