WE just saw the release of the Pakistan Economic Survey 2024-25 and the presentation of the budget for 2025-26. There is a lot that can be said about the economy and the budget, but in this article I want to focus on education and what the Survey and the budget tell us about it and this government’s priorities. All figures in this article are taken from the Economic Survey 2024-25.
Empty vessels make the most noise, and the Economic Survey section on education is a poorly written chapter, which is clearly meant to hide more than to reveal, as well as to glorify while having nothing to extol. It tells us that enrolments at the pre-primary level have declined over the last year or so while those at the primary, middle and high school level have increased a bit and that college/ university enrolments have come down somewhat.
Do these statistics tell a story? Yes, they do, and a very strong one. They tell us that despite the prime minister’s declaration of an ‘education emergency’ and despite the fact that around 26 million five- to 16-year-olds are out of school, the government has neither a strategy for this category of children nor an actual plan that it is implementing. We are seeing trend movements in enrolments. If education was a priority, if there was a strategy, if a plan was being implemented, one would expect to see a strong movement — beyond the trend — in an upward direction. Instead, what we see is the usual drift. This is the story of education for the current government. In this regard, the story is no different from that for most governments of the past: education has not been a priority for any government.
The Economic Survey tells us that the national literacy rate stands at 60.5 per cent only: 68pc for men and 52.8pc for women. The urban literacy rate is 74.09pc — for urban men it is 78.13pc. For rural women, it is only to 41.67pc. So, the gender and rural-urban gaps continue to persist. But there is a story hidden in geography as well. Where the literacy rate for Punjab is quoted at 66.25pc, it is 42pc for Balochistan whereas for rural women in Balochistan, it is only 26.59pc, ie, only one in four women in rural Balochistan is literate.
It is clear that governments — federal and provincial — do not want to spend more on education.
The net enrolment rate at matriculation for boys in Balochistan is only 18pc and just 9pc for the girls in the province. And this is supposed to be a federation!
Any government, all governments, any society, all societies, should feel ashamed at these numbers. But we don’t. We are celebrating our ‘achievements’.
This is a quote from the education chapter in the Economic Survey. “Cumulative education expenditures by federal and provincial governments in FY25 (July to March) were estimated at 0.8pc of GDP. Expenditures on education-related activities during FY25 decreased by 29.4pc…”. They decreased from Rs1,251.06 billion to Rs899.6bn. Of course, there will be some spend from April to June but will it be 30pc? Unlikely. So, expenditure on education has gone down in nominal terms too. In real terms, given inflation, the drop would be much larger. And now we are spending only 0.8pc of our GDP on education, whereas UN agencies recommend spending a minimum of around 4pc of GDP on education. And the manifestoes of all major political parties promise that education expenditure will increase to 4pc of GDP.
The figure of 0.8pc includes all vanity projects such as the Daanish schools and the laptop schemes, especially in the federation and Punjab. I am sure it includes a portion of advertising spend of the provinces as well. But if you ask the ministers, the chief ministers or the prime minister, they will tell you, and emphatically so, that education is a top priority for their governments.
The Economic Survey headlines the news that the country now has 269 universities: 160 public sector and 109 private sector universities. But it does not dwell too much on the fact that the Higher Education Commission has not been given more resources for the new public sector universities. Some of the universities, even the older and bigger ones, are facing severe financial difficulties. Their budgets from the HEC have been more or less stagnant. Some cannot even make payrolls and have to cut pension payments. Some of the new universities in the public sector have not been given any support at all by the HEC. The government has done nothing to address these concerns. But launching new universities has been a priority.
The dialogue on education is quite broken. It is clear that governments — federal and provincial — do not want to spend more on education or on fixing the public sector education system. They believe they do not have the resources for it, nor do they have the patience and, possibly, the ability for medium- to long-term reforms. It is also clear that, given the thriving private sector in education, it is only the poor who depend on public sector provision of education and so, from a political point of view, there is no pressure on the government to fix education either: the poor are even more voiceless in this country than the middle- and upper-income classes.
And yet, in terms of rhetoric and public pronouncements, the government cannot be politically incorrect to admit all of the above. So, it will continue to pay lip service to the ‘education emergency’ and the ‘right to education’. And this game is bound to continue. Who will suffer? The young of the country and, therefore, the future of the country. But, for those in power, hunooz dilli dur ast, reality has not set in and political horizons are too short.
The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums.
Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2025