Why not budget for books?

My six-year-old son and two-year-old daughter wait anxiously to pay their weekly visit to the nearby New Castle County’s free public library, here in Delaware, US. They say that it is fun to go to the library, participate in storytime activities and choose their favourite books to read, which they finish in a week’s time. Today, before leaving the library, I thought about checking the budget of these public libraries. I came to know that there are 15 libraries run by this county for its residents, equivalent to half the population of Islamabad, with a total operating budget of about $13 million. Additionally, there are schools, colleges, community centres and universities in the same region, each having a high-quality library.

Then I thought about the likely dialogues going on in the power corridors of federal and provincial governments in Pakistan at the moment. Influential groups and associations would be advocating for subsidies, tax incentives and mega-infrastructure projects to get a pie in the roughly $45 billion federal budget and the $30 billion provincial budgets. The energy sector alone has consumed almost $30 billion in the last eight years. The simple question is: how much budget, if any, will be allocated for the establishment and expansion of public libraries in cities and towns across the country?

Some may argue that being a developing country, Pakistan needs to focus on mega projects related to energy, road infrastructure and industrial parks. Some may term public libraries a luxury for a country like ours. But I do not agree with these arguments. First, given that we are a developing country, there probably is more of a need to invest in books and education here. Second, allocating budgets for public libraries is a matter of priority as we can see multi-million dollar funds being doled out either for inefficient operations of state-owned enterprises or for mega projects, while the majority of medium- and small-sized cities and towns don’t even have a single library, and if there is any, the service and quality they provide, both leave a lot to be desired. As the main consumers of neighbourhood public libraries anywhere are children and senior citizens, often the most marginalised or least cared for segments in Pakistan, it is no wonder that there is little focus on developing something that they will have the most use for.

This issue is not only related to resources and prioritisation; it is also embedded in the flawed institutional architecture of the country. First, we have not allowed local governments to flourish enough to think about these issues and devise appropriate strategies to serve local communities. Whenever local governments have been formed, they were either to serve a military dictator or were handicapped during democratic regimes. Nadeemul Haque and Ali Cheema have been writing on the importance of developing vibrant cities and functioning local governments respectively, areas that need to be focused upon by policymakers and the people at large.

Whenever proposals for any educational or intellectual initiative are made, the discussion triggers towards controversies relating to federalism and the blame game starts between federal and provincial governments instead of there being an effort to develop a coherent strategy to achieve such goals. My point here is that if metro buses and flyovers can be sponsored in cities by federal and provincial budgets, why not support small cities and towns to establish public libraries? Moreover, due to the flawed taxation system, it has become easier in Pakistan to extract money from the poor through a higher rate of general sales tax (GST) on goods and services instead of collecting property taxes and capital gains from the elite. Property taxes are major sources of revenues of vibrant cities but these have long been neglected in Pakistan as the imposition of customs duties, GST and federal excise duties are the preferred modes of revenue collection even though these are regressive in nature.

American Economist Edward Glaeser in his book about Abbasid caliphs, Triumph of the City, wrote that “they collected scholars as if they were valuable baubles and eventually massed those minds in the House of Wisdom, a sort of research institution whose first job was to import the world’s knowledge and translate it into Arabic”. He has made this argument to emphasise not only how physical proximity matters for the growth of knowledge and ideas, but that it also reflects the tradition of thriving societies which allocate resources for knowledge. Glaeser highlighted the same process in ancient Athens and modern-day New York City.

Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal is leading the campaign for educational enrollment, which is appreciable. However, there is also a need to create the right ambience for knowledge and cultural growth in our cities and towns. I can only hope that in the upcoming federal budget there is a specified budget for books and public libraries, and our fiscal analysts, politicians and macroeconomists start analysing such aspects of the budget instead of merely making arguments for and against fiscal deficits, subsidies and tax rates.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 20^th, 2016.

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