Education spending in FATA

A literacy rate of 24 per cent, a million children out of school, and numerous nonfunctional facilities in FATA

As things are, it is not straightforward to know Fata’s budget for education in this season of budgets. For a proper budget, Fata has to be a province or part of a province. It is part of the federal government, which is in the business of education only tangentially. There are too many cooks spoiling the broth. First there is Safron, the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions, that has more than Fata on its plate. On the ground, the K-P governor represents the federal government and effectively directs the Fata Secretariat. In recent years, the security establishment has called all the shots. The Fata Secretariat has a finance department, but its website is silent about the new budget. Nay, it says nothing about the past budgets either. There is also a planning and development department. It does not say anything about the development budget.

Federal budget documents are the only source of information. These documents show a current budget allocation of Rs 21.9 billion and a development budget allocation of Rs26.9 billion. Thus in 2017-18, the region will receive a total budget of Rs48.8 billion, less than Rs10,000 per person per annum. The development budget is higher than the current budget, indicating that there are fewer existing facilities to be maintained than those to be created. In the revised estimates of 2016-17, an allocation of Rs8.4 billion is shown outside of PSDP for Citizen Losses Compensation Programme. In the 2016-17 budget, a Rs100 billion Special Development Programme for Temporarily Displaced Persons was included. The revised estimate just shows an expenditure of Rs14 billion on security enhancement, including Rs5.6 billion for Fata. In the budget for 2017-18, a sum of Rs45 billion each has been allocated for IDPs and security enhancement.

What about education? The current budget allocation for 2017-18 is Rs12.8 billion, an increase of 9.4 per cent over the previous budget. The revised estimate is the same as the budget estimate, ie, Rs 11.7 billion, suggesting that no information was available at the time of budget preparation. These numbers do indicate that more than 50 per cent of the total current budget is spent on education, most of it on elementary education. How much of it is feeding ghost teachers and schools is anybody’s guess. On the development side, the allocation of Rs26.9 billion is 20.6 per cent higher than the previous budget, but 26.6 per cent less than the revised estimate. It includes foreign assistance of Rs 490 million. A few projects mentioned in the federal budget documents relate largely to infrastructure. Strangely, the entire amount is shown against the functional classification of “general public services not elsewhere defined.” In the development budget of the Higher Education Commission, one notices a project called Fata University, ongoing since 2015. Against the total cost of Rs1.6 billion, half a billion have been spent and another Rs250 million are allocated for 2017-18. Another project, Provision of Higher Education Opportunities for Students of Balochistan and Fata (Phase-II), has been allocated Rs300 million. The share of Fata is not known. There is no new project on higher education in Fata.

Little wonder, a literacy rate of 24 per cent, over a million children out of school and a large number of nonfunctional facilities sum up the educational scene in Fata. Imagine the state of Fata today, if there was foresight to spend in good time the money that had to be spent on Operation Zarb-e-Azb, on an Education for All programme. Any further delay on the already approved Fata reforms, with a due share in NFC, will keep its people in the dark ages.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 13^th, 2017.

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