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Education is important, above all, because it empowers people to take more control of their lives. At a personal level, it provides people with self-confidence needed to make their opinions heard. At a community level, it provides the skills through which people can protect their rights--to land, to schools, or to participation in public life. At a national level, it creates a demand to be heard. Without education, democracy is an empty shell.
There are some other commitments reconfirmed by the government at EFA-SAARC meeting, which requires revolutionary changes in policymaking to implement and achieve them. Elimination of gender disparity is one of the big challenges in this regard, which may never be achieved without introducing a co-education system from primary to tertiary levels. This task is politically difficult, as there is a chance of resistance from politico-religious circles of the country, who, at the moment, are very much engaged in decision-making.
Ministers for education of SAARC countries, through a ministerial meeting held last month in Islamabad, have advised the governments to allocate progressively a minimum of 4% of GDP to education. This, too, seems very difficult and an almost impossible task in near future because 4% of the GDP means that education needs approximately Rs170bn annually, and that ample amount, which is more than our total defence budget (160bn for the year 2003-4), would never be earmarked. Under the camouflage of 'national interest', invisible economic managers are not going to cut down defence allocations to meet this demand.
A meagre amount of Rs3.1bn has been allocated for the development of education sector in this year's budget, compared to previous year's allocations of Rs2.7bn. According to the latest economic survey, in the year 1995-96 the total allocations for education sector were equivalent to 2% of the GDP. In the year 1996-97, they were raised to 2.62 %, but when the military government took over in 1999, these allocations were reduced to 1.6% for the year 2000-01, and were slightly increased to 1.7% of the GDP for the fiscal year 2003-04.
The education sector is facing a huge gap between rural and urban areas as well, similar to the rest of the social sector components. In every programme, which aims to bring reforms and to increase overall literacy rates, policymakers give priority to urban development in terms of allocations and projects. As a result, in the year 2003, the estimated rural literacy (40.91%) is less than that of urban literacy (68.74%). Although the UNESCO Pakistan report reveals that growth rate for female literacy has nearly doubled, still the gap between the two genders is very huge. Estimated figures for 2003 show that female literacy rate is 38.57%, while male literacy rate is 61.93%.
If we compare female literacy rates of urban and rural areas, the gap is still larger--61.89% urban literate women and only 27.06% rural literate women. Another evidence of the increasing divide between rural and urban development is that of 21 districts where literacy is very low. Only two of these districts are urban-based. Gujarat and Jhelum had their status changed due to very high literacy. There is a need to further explore such success stories and what factors lie behind such rapid achievements through research and analysis, and replicated in areas where there is low or very low levels of literacy.
Policymakers and planners have been emphasizing on investments in higher literacy education, instead of primary education, to achieve set target. Low levels of investment in basic and primary education, successive failures of promises made in every plan, and the practice of missing well-marked deadlines, have created a credibility gap. Information technology education--which is more or less a completely urban-based education--is enjoying a larger chunk of the budgetary allocations as compared to formal education sector.
Planners are unable to understand the reality that increasing monetary allocations to formal and informal education, with special focus to the rural sector, will only lead to an increased growth rate of literacy. This year's announced Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) is also an evidence that higher education and money-oriented IT sector has been given much importance than the people-oriented formal education sector. PSDP figures show that higher education sector, including IT sector, has been allocated Rs6.5bn, while the formal education sector is left to pick up the crumbs, with Rs3.1bn. It is being claimed that the formal education sector allocations rose from Rs5.5bn in 2002-03 to Rs7.5bn in 2003-04, which translates to a ratio of merely 4.7% of the total allocations for development sector.
Rural literate candidates who are competing for jobs in public and private sectors, for admissions in standard educational institutions that are again situated in urban areas, find it impossible to survive due to the fact that the rural areas are facing deprivation in every social sector. The only system that saves them from complete isolation is the quota allocation, which prevails in public sector jobs and in educational institutions; yet it, too, is arguably unjust.
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Kashif Zulfiqar
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Comments
Azeem Azeem Notta | Oct 28th, 2003
I like your article because it is very informative and interesting about the education in Pakistan. I am also from pakistan and I well know the education there because I spent all of my childhood their and the system is very strict and has a lot of expectations from the schools Know I like the term s"
hool privatization" because we don't hear that always from our teachers and you explained it very well.
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