LAHORE: Like previous years, no major intervention was witnessed by the provincial governments in Pakistan vis-à-vis the implementation of right to education (RTE) laws during year 2016. And this is despite the concern expressed by a UN body— Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)—in May this year. The committee had expressed concern over lack of compulsory education laws in Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit- Baltistan and poor enforcement of the RTE laws in provinces areaswhere they exist. The historic Article 25-A which makes free and compulsory education a right to all children of the age of 5 to 16 years was inserted into the Constitution of Pakistan on April 19, 2010. Despite the passage of six years Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan have yet to introduce respective necessary legislationwhilewhere the laws exist including Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan the subordinate legislation—the formulation of rules of business— is lacking without which implementation of the laws is not possible. It is learnt the Sindh government has almost completed its work on the rules of business for its RTE law and is likely to introduce them soon. The Punjab government is also deliberating on the rules though nothing concrete is in sight. One can hope that the governments wake up from deep slumber and one sees some tangible work where the laws are lacking and taking forward the implementation of RTE laws where these exist in 2017. On the front of public financing of education, Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa government took a lead over other provinces as it allocated 25 percent of its total budget to education. The other provinces including Punjab allocated 20 percent of their total budget to education. On the development and non-salary budget in education, the Punjab government however left others far behind by allocating Rs 44 billion as development budget and Rs 33 billion as non-salary budget. The Sindh government,
however, remained close to the Punjab government in nonsalary budget (which the experts termthe real development budget) as it allocated Rs 31 billion under this head. As the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) retired in 2015 and new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are in place, it is unfortunate to note that the response to these international commitments remains vague to date. The SDG No.4 pertains to education and the new goal is “to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” The quality aspect in public schooling has long been put on the back burner and this is evident from the fact that anyone who can afford prefers to send his or her children to private schools instead of a public school where education is free and even textbooks are provided free. This makes the new goal really challenging as under the goal the governments are supposed to ensure not just education but equitable “quality” education. And obviously we are not achieving this goal if only the private sector strives for quality. Though inclusivity remains a distant dream, one can hope that this long neglected rather forgotten aspect in different spheres of life particularly in education may attract some attention of those at the helm. Understandingmagnitude of the problem related to promotion of lifelong learning opportunities “for all” becomes easy with some statistics. A joint policy paper by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report released in July 2016 revealed that 8 percent of the world’s out-of-school children lived in Pakistan. According to the report out of 263 million such children and youth worldwide some 21.5million of them were from Pakistan. A number of factors contribute to this disappointing scenariowhich socio-economic conditions on the top. Themissing facilities in public schools are also linked to the growing number of the out-of-school population in Pakistan. While hundreds of public schools still lack basic facilities like toilets, boundary walls and electricity, thousands of sanctioned teaching posts in schools remain vacant making mockery of repeated political rhetoric of “prioritizing” education. In Punjab, on the higher education side, the issue related to sub-campuses of public universities established under public- private partnership remained a subject of heated debate and demonstration by the students enrolled. The situation remained tense particularly in the provincial metropolis on several occasions when the students of BZU Lahore campus students protested on roads and caused immense problems for the commuters. It was first time in the history that the tenure of a sitting Vice Chancellorwas terminated during 2016. Prof Dr Muhammad Khalique Ahmed, VC of Ghazi University, Dera Ghazi Khan, was shown the doors for violating the rules for leaving the station without approval of the chancellor/governor. A massive rally was also taken out by the college teachers in late 2016 against the Higher Education Department Punjab for ignoring them vis-à-vis promotions and other issues.