IN May, the government declared an ‘education emergency’ to enrol 26 million out-of-school children in the country. In June, the government presented the annual budget for 2024-25 which made not a single mention of any allocation to execute the ‘emergency’. Hardly anybody seems to have noticed the anomaly.

After the emergency was announced, people realised that 26 million was an astounding figure, and they hoped that education would be one of the key issues in the budget presentation, but that did not happen. People now wonder if the emergency was merely a political rhetoric.

Although education is a provincial subject, if the federal government can declare an emergency, there is every reason for it to keep the matter a point of focus during the budget session, which is a session that is supposed to outline the government’s financial plans for the whole financial year to follow.

As thinsg stand, the matter is now left to the provincial governments to decide what they want to do about the emergency declared by the federal government.

It appears that the federal government was only interested in making some rosy announcement without any degree of seriousness in terms of policy execution. The status of education is likely to remain what it has always been in Pakistan; poor.

Anwar Sayab Khan
Bannu

Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2024