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The federal cabinet to increase public-private investment in the education sector from the current level of 2.6 per cent of GDP to four per cent is a good step.However, approval of this decision comes with several qualifiers.

The first and most obvious one relates to the fact that improving the currently dismal quality of primary, secondary and higher education in the country's public sector is not only an issue of more funding but also of how the funds are used. In the past (and even now) one has heard of many instances of schools and colleges built in urban centres, small towns or rural areas but they fell into disuse, either because the teaching staff posted there would not show up or because a local feudal or influential would encroach on the premises and illegally appropriate it for personal use.

Who can forget the so-called ghost teachers scandal, where a government survey (undertaken by the army) in 1997 discovered over 40,000 'ghost' teachers in Punjab alone -- i.e. teachers who were on the government payroll and regularly drew salaries but never showed up for their official teaching duty.

In fact, the National Education Census (on which the cabinet was briefed in its Wednesday meeting by the education minister) itself reveals that 58.5 per cent of all educational institutions that were not functioning (7,442 out of a total of 12,737) were found in Sindh.

It also reveals that out of the 50,585 villages in the country that were included in the census, a total of 10,908 (over 21.5 per cent) did not have any educational institutions at all. In addition to this, 56.4 per cent of all public-sector institutions had no electricity, 40.5 per cent had no toilets, 37.8 per cent had no boundary wall, 32.3 per cent had no drinking water and 6.8 per cent had no building!

And the problem is not just the dilapidated or non-existent infrastructure; the quality of teaching, the soundness of the curriculum and syllabuses and the general level of education being imparted to students is all well below par. Also, there is an ongoing debate that questions whether the focus of education reform should be primary or higher education.

Here, while a pragmatic approach would be to spend the funding on all sectors, given the fundamental importance of primary schooling to any education system, the government needs to focus more on this level. Also, while increasing funding is welcome and in fact necessary for the country to achieve anywhere close to universal literacy, there has to be a concerted effort towards proper utilisation of money spent on education. This can only happen with more rigorous oversight of the education spending at the federal and provincial levels.

The prime minister, while announcing the cabinet decision to the press, also spoke of increasing the literacy rate from the current 53 per cent to 65 per cent by the next census. This too is a worthy objective, but the very figure of 53 per cent is hotly contested by independent education experts, the main focus of the scepticism being that the significant rise in the literacy rate to the current level of 53 per cent, given that no meaningful reform in the primary education sector has taken place since the last census.

To be more precise, both male and female enrolment rates in primary education have remained stagnant for the past many years and the dropout rate (percentage of students who drop out after class V) has not fallen either. Of course, all this does not take away from another argument -- a strong one as well -- which advocates even larger education budget (as a percentage of GDP) for a country such as Pakistan. After all countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan (ravaged by World War II) and Malaysia are where they are today in large part because of massive investment in education (as high as 10 per cent of GDP).

Source: The News More