Pre-budget forum: To lower extremism, up the education budget

Speakers call for more school funding, better tax policy, transparency.

PESHAWAR:

With over 700 educational institutes either destroyed or partially damaged in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) during the last two years due to militancy and natural disaster, the provincial government needs to allocate substantial amount for education in the forthcoming budget.

“Our province is already lagging behind other provinces in education, which has suffered the most in the wake of militancy. The government needs to allocate more resources to this sector in the next budget,” Fazlullah, a student of the Journalism and Mass Communication Department at the University of Peshawar (UoP), stressed.

Speaking on the sideline of an open forum on the K-P budget organised by UoP’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communication in collaboration with Internews, Fazlullah called education ‘the most important sector’ and noted that its weakness was a major cause of the extremism that was wreaking havoc in tribal areas and K-P. With budget preparation in its final stages, people in K-P expect special grants from the federal government and foreign donors to revive and rebuild damaged schools and help over 700,000 affected students across the province, he said, adding that half of them are girls.

Former Finance Minister Iftikhar Mohmand, UoP Department of Economics’ Prof Dr Muhammad Naeem, Journalism and Mass Communication Chairman Prof Dr Altafullah Khan and Chartered Accountant Kashif Maqbool Sehgal spoke on the occasion.

Mohmand said that the government should give top priority to education and health sectors and earmark sufficient resources for them in the forthcoming budget.

Apart from initiating new projects, the provincial government must focus on rehabilitation and reconstruction of damaged schools across the province to revive the education system and make up for the losses students incurred following the ascendance of militant groups in the region, he added.

In the outgoing financial year budget Rs10.2 billion was allocated for 92 projects in the education sector.

Prof Dr Naeem spoke on revenue and expenditure in the budget, saying, “Pakistan’s reliance on indirect taxes is the hallmarks of a weak and depressed economy.”

He said that the gap between revenue and expenditure was widening, which is not a good indictor as ideally, it should not be more than four per cent.

The expert said that the country was faced with a host of challenges that could be turned into opportunities, provided the government taps the unexplored potential of the province with specific focus on afforestation and revival of tourism.

Kashif Maqbool Sehgal focused on best practices and the importance of budget preparation, noting that a longer timeframe should be allocated for the budget process and budget terminology should be simplified to appeal to the common man.

Moreover, he stressed that there should be accountability and audit of the budget and capacity building training should be held for all parliamentarians.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 11^th, 2011.