Sindh's education budget: the numbers that hide the collapse

Every June, Sindh presents its education budget. Every June, the numbers are larger. And every June, nothing changes for the child sitting an exam whose result has already been sold.

This year, Rs635 billion. CM Murad Ali Shah called it an unprecedented investment. The press reported the number and moved on. Nobody asked the harder question: what does Sindh actually get for what it spends?

The answer is damning: an Arithmetic of Misdirection.

Let’s start with what the government does not advertise. The consolidated budget for the three education departments: School Education, Colleges, Universities and Boards dropped from Rs523.7 billion in FY2025–26 to Rs497.7 billion in FY2026–27. The Rs635 billion headline only holds once allied allocations, foreign-assisted projects and grant categories are aggregated. The underlying department budgets shrank.

The Sindh development allocation confirms this. Education received Rs25.8 billion under the Annual Development Programme compared to Transport and Communication's Rs39.5 billion, Irrigation's Rs30.9 billion, and Local Government's Rs121.6 billion. The ADP itself was slashed by 30%. When the government had to choose, infrastructure won, and Education lost.

This is not a budget for investment. It is a budget of maintenance dressed in the language of transformation.

The Board Scandal the Sindh Government Budget Ignores.

In April 2026, the arrest of the Controller of Examinations at the Mirpurkhas Board triggered an investigation that became a province-wide crisis. What investigators found was not isolated misconduct. It was a coordinated system. Yes, the  “Sindh’s System” 

Approximately Rs200 million was allegedly routed through the Universities and Boards Department in exchange for manipulated results, doctored records, and preferential postings. In Nawabshah, results for around 90,000 students were reportedly altered.

Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, and Larkana boards were no different. Meritorious students who sat the exam honestly and stayed out of Sindh’s System were commercially thrown out.

Now examine what FY2026–27 does about it. The Universities and Boards Department receives Rs9.4 billion. Out of which Rs6.8 billion flows directly to the boards as a grant-in-aid for examination fee subsidies. The same boards and the same officials with the same structures and the same Zero conditionality and Zero accountability framework attached to a single rupee.

The structural rot is not new. Boards have operated without permanent leadership for years: ad hoc chairmen, rotating controllers, political appointees. Financial survival depends on Paper leaks.

The government is not reforming the examination system. It is paying for it to continue.

The Asian Development Bank has put over $350 million into Sindh’s education sector. Nobody questions the need or outcome. The problem is attached to the money.
Here is how it works.

The ADB gives Sindh a loan to build/upgrade school blocks. Those school blocks are then handed over to private companies to run. The government owns the building. A private operator manages what happens inside it. This arrangement, called Education Management Organisations, was not a local policy choice.

It was a condition baked into the loan design. In plain terms, to access the financing, Sindh had to agree to bring private management into public schools. The ADB calls this “unlocking critical quality improvements, efficiencies, and value for money.”

What it actually means is that a foreign lender is using debt to reshape how Pakistan’s public education system is governed.

Academics have named it directly. A 2022 peer-reviewed paper in Globalisation, Societies and Education documented Pakistan "pouring significant money into the private provision of education, encouraged by the policies and investments of international donor-partners such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank", describing it as education becoming "a private commodity." The ADB was named as an architect, not a bystander.

Foreign-assisted project spending Rs32.5 billion in FY2025–26 does not flow through the provincial accountability architecture. It is managed through donor-controlled Project Implementation Units. When projects close, the PIUs dissolve. The schools remain. The institutional capacity to sustain them does not. This is aid that builds infrastructure while consistently failing to build the state.

Now let’s analyse The HEC Trap. The federal recurring grant to universities has been frozen at Rs65 billion since FY2017–18. Not reduced but frozen. Through years of inflation above 20%, expanding enrolment and rising costs, the number has not moved. For FY2026–27, HEC calculated a need of Rs138 billion and submitted a minimum demand of Rs100 billion. The government held it at Rs65 billion unchanged for the 9th consecutive year.

On the development side, the PSDP allocation was cut by 35% from Rs61.1 billion to Rs39.5 billion in FY2025–26, then partially restored to Rs41 billion this year. This is presented as recovery, but in reality it is not. Praising Rs41 billion against a collapsed baseline is like commending someone for slowing a haemorrhage after critical blood loss.

Against this, Sindh raised its SHEC allocation from Rs42.3 billion to Rs45.8 billion for 32 public universities. The Sindh HEC, running "on an ad hoc basis from a bungalow" with no permanent leadership and no meaningful engagement with vice-chancellors, distributes this money through political proximity, not institutional need. More money through the same broken pipes.

One line in the budget makes the real priority visible. Rs500 million was allocated for foreign university scholarships. Rs115 million was released for six students at Oxford. The remaining Rs385 million carries forward to FY2026–27. For every student whose board result may have been sold, the state's answer is a programme that spent Rs19 million per beneficiary.

The FY2026–27 budget is a failure of structural seriousness, not of intention. The boards full of corrupt practices receive Rs6.8 billion unconditionally. The ADB embeds privatisation logic in public schools and Sindh's documents record it without question.

The federal recurring grant to universities has been frozen for nine years and remains frozen. The SHEC distributes billions through an institution that has never developed the capacity to distribute them meaningfully, and KU is already making noise for a fracture caused by the Sindh government. Don’t know where exactly the revenge with Karachi ends. 

The numbers keep growing. The infrastructure of accountability does not exist. Pakistan does not only fail its children through underfunding. It fails them by funding the institutions of failure and calling it an investment. 

What does a student in Nawabshah, who studied honestly and whose result may have been sold, get from Rs635 billion? The numbers continue to climb because there is no accountability whatsoever.

Rs635 billion is not an education budget but it is an election war chest, deployed to entrench political power rather than to educate children. The money is spent today. The votes are counted tomorrow and  the cost is borne by the children of Sindh for years to come.