Is the education budget growing or shrinking?

Analysis shows that while amount of allocation is increasing its share in pie is decreasing

ISLAMABAD: While the federal and provincial governments are making tall claims of increasing the budgetary allocations for education, the actual picture is murkier than claimed.

By some accounts, Punjab is offering the lowest increase or 0.84 % compared to the previous year.

For the education sector in the new financial year of 2016-17, the federal government announced an allocation of Rs108.97 billion; Punjab Rs312.80 billion; Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Rs143.44 billion; Sindh Rs176.39 billion and Balochistan Rs49.11 billion. In total it makes Rs790 billion.

By the end of 2015, Pakistan failed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to the UN Development Programme report of 2015, Pakistan pledged to push the literacy rate to 88%, but it could only achieve 58% by the end of 2015. The seriousness of the government could be gauged from the fact that once an education ministry official stated in a meeting that for two years no meeting could be held about MDGs.

Provincial performance

When compared with the previous budget of 2015-16, K-P stands highest with 19.81 % increase in education spending, while Punjab lowest at 0.84% along with Balochistan which has increase of 1.21%. Sindh increased its education budget by 11.98% as compared with the previous fiscal year.



When the increase in the education budget was compared with the total budget, again K-P leads with 28.40%, followed by Sindh with 19.22%, Balochistan 16.99% and 2.14% at the federal level.

Hence, the lowest budget increase for education has been witnessed in the PML-N run Punjab, although the party  keeps harping about the government’s will of increasing the budget to four per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Decline in allocation

Interestingly, the allocations of federal and provincial governments combined nullify the claim of increase in the education budget. In 2013-14, in total, Rs579.8 billion were allocated and it was Rs656 billion in 2014-15, which represented only 11.66% increase and it gradually decreased in subsequent years. In the year 2015-16 around Rs733 billion were allocated for education which was 10.80% increase and Rs790.70 billion for the ongoing fiscal year which signifies lowest increase since 2013—7.19%.

Unspent budget

Another alarming trend portrayed is the lethargy in the spending of development budget by provinces. Going through the development budget for the previous two fiscal years denote that Punjab could not spend half of the budget and the funds lapsed. In 2014-15 Punjab allocated Rs45 billion of development budget but spent only Rs23 billion. Similarly in 2015-16 the same province allocated Rs50 billion but only utilised Rs23 billion of the development outlay. 

Published in The Express Tribune, July 26^th, 2016.