PESHAWAR: The trend in education expenditure over the past few fiscal years in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa shows that the provincial government every year upwardly revised budgetary allocation for education sector only to lapse after a paltry chunk of the funds is utilised.
This has been revealed in a recent research publication of Institute of Social and Policy Sciences (I-SAPS) public financing of education in Pakistan (2010-11 to 2015-16. I-SAPS have been analysing public expenditure of federal and provincial governments since 2007-08.
The research report says that the allocation of funds for education sector has been consistently increasing from Rs. 51 billion in 2010-11 to Rs 120 billion in 2015-16, showing a raise of 135 per cent over the past six years. But the funds could not be utilised due to lack of capacity of the education managers of the province.
The lowest expenditure was recorded in 2013-14 when 16 percent of the total education budget, which stood at Rs. 16 billion, remained unspent. I-SAPS said that in 2010-11, a budget of Rs. 50.96 billion was allocated for education sector in KP out of which Rs. 1.75 billion could not be spent during the year.
The education budget was increased by 24 percent to Rs. 63.17 billion 2011-12, but the trend of fund lapsing could not be checked. Three per cent of the budgetary allocation lapsed in the fiscal year.
In 2012-13, an allocation of Rs. 78.15 billion was made for education which represented an increase of 24 percent over the earmarked budget in 2011-12. As was the case in previous years, the budget remained unspent. In the following year, the KP government gave another increase of 24 percent in the budget and raised it to Rs. 96.41 billion. However, 16 per cent of the budget lapsed.
With an increase of 10 percent, the government allocated Rs. 106.84 billion for education sector in 2014-15, but Rs Rs. 4.4 billion of allocated budget lapsed. In the same Fiscal Years (FY) only 86 percent of the non-salary budget was utilised whereas the expenditure was merely 59 percent of the allocated budget.
In 2015-16, a budgetary increase to the tune of Rs. 12.88 billion was made for education in the province, which represented an increase of 12 percent over the previous year. Except for 2013-14, secondary education has received the highest share of budget during the past six years.
The budget for primary education was also consistently increased until 2014-15 which showed a decrease as compared with the budget in 2013-14.
The SAPS report also shows that during all the past six years from 2010-11 to 2015-16, the share of secondary education in total current budget has exceeded the share of primary and higher education combined.