In his address to the joint session of the Parliament, President Zardari declared 2011 as the Year of Education. If the government has any important initiative up its sleeve for the year, it has yet not divulged it to the public. During a briefing early this month on the educational reality in Sindh, the President was informed that of the 11 million school-age children only 6.4 million were enrolled. Twenty per cent of the schools had no building at all, 45 per cent comprised only one room or two and over 60 per cent of the schools had just one teacher or two. While this might have come as a surprise to the President, what he was shown was only a tip of the iceberg.
Clichs apart, education has never been the priority of any government in Pakistan including the present one. The result is that the country faces an educational emergency which is rife with disastrous social, economic and strategic consequences. The neglect on the part of successive governments is reflected in the meager resources allocated to the education sector. According to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2009-10, Pakistan spends only 2.1 percent of GDP on education, which is less than Bangladesh (2.6 percent) and India (3.3 percent), and much below levels of expenditure seen in countries such as Malaysia (4.7 percent) and Vietnam (5.2 percent). The neglect has led to an extraordinarily slow pace of development as a result of which the millennium goals set by the UN for 2015 can only be met by Punjab in 2041, by Sindh in 2049, by KP in 2064 and Balochistan in 2100. Slow educational development means insufficient educated, technical and scientific manpower, which is bad for economy as well as defence in an age of high technology.
After the 18th amendment, education has become a fundamental right and the state is bound to provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years. The government needs to arrange resources for the fulfillments of its constitutional obligation by bringing the big landlords and real estate giants into the tax net. Equally important is to rely more on diplomacy for resolving disputes with neighbours than on a costly and untenable competition in arms and ammunitions.