Spending on education in Punjab

A recent televised story showed the Punjab chief minister blow hot and cold over the low utilisation of allocated funds on education in the outgoing year of 2016-17. Pakistan’s historic under-spending on education continues at the national level. This is evident from all the national and provincial budgets presented recently. In Punjab, an effort was made to significantly increase budgetary allocations in the last year’s budget. However, the failure of the executing agencies to spend the enhanced budget has raised a number of questions. First, however, the horrifying details.

Let’s starting with the current budget, which cannot be dismissed as “non-development” budget in the case of education. It involves human resource, school environment and educational materials. In the 2016-17 budget, an allocation of Rs64.6 billion was made compared to the previous years’ utilisation of Rs44.8 billion. It was a jump of 44 per cent. According to the Annual Budget Statement 2017-18, a statutory document presented to the provincial assembly, the revised estimate of utilisation was Rs53.8 billion, or 17 per cent less than the budgeted amount. Except for the miscellaneous item “Education Affairs, Services Not Elsewhere Defined”, all items under the Head of Account called “Education Affairs and Services” recorded serious under-spending. The worst offender was secondary education, failing to utilise 20 per cent of the budgeted amount, followed by higher education with 17 per cent under-utilisation. The result is that the allocation in the next year’s budget is Rs44.3 billion, 31 per cent less than the previous budget and half a billion less than the amount utilised in 2015-16.

Now the development budget is meant to create new hardware and add software to enhance quality. The actual development expenditure in 2015-16 on education was a mere Rs19.3 billion. In the budget for 2016-17, it was increased more than three times to Rs63 billion. Secondary education received an increase of more than three times and the tertiary education budget more than doubled. The utilisation, however, was pathetic. Out of Rs47.3 billion, the utilisation in the case of secondary education was only Rs22.7 billion. In primary education, the utilisation was only Rs0.4 billion against the budget estimate of Rs1.9 billion. Only in tertiary education, the utilisation of Rs17 billion was more than the budgeted allocation of Rs13.2 billion. The overall development allocation of Rs61.4 billion in the next year’s budget is, understandably, less than the previous budget allocation of Rs63 billion.

The education budget discussed so far is related to the Punjab level expenditure made by the departments concerned under the heads of development and non-development. However, the largest spending happens at the local level in the field of school education. No details are available here. The last year’s citizens budget, a document not published this year for inexplicable reasons, placed the total expenditure on education at Rs312.8 billion. Out of this, Rs169 billion was to be spent through the local authorities. The revised estimate places it at a much lower level of Rs101.5 billion. Regardless, the next year’s allocation is Rs230.1 billion. This takes the total education budget in the 2017-18 budget to Rs345 billion. The hopes are being pinned on the newly created District Education Authorities to increasing enrollment and quality in the school education sector. Let’s hope that the new system will be able to absorb the increasing allocations to produce desired outcomes. Similarly, an emphasis on consolidation rather than token creation should be guiding the spending on higher education.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 16^th, 2017.

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