By Zubeida Mustafa
AN UNUSUAL feature of the Federal Finance Minister’s budget speech on Thursday was the emphasis he placed on the need to develop the social sector in Pakistan, especially education.
His professed concern at the poor state of this sector was expressed in the shape of enormous increases in allocations for some of the social sector items in the Budget.
This is significant, given the poor performance of the Government in the fields of health and education — none of the Sixth Plan targets in these fields could be met in the first two years.
It has been clear that the major factor responsible for this state of affairs has been the paucity of resources made available to the social sector. In terms of budgetary allocations, the pace of implementation of the Sixth Plan has also been painfully slow. Only 23 per cent of the planned amount was spent on education and 27 per cent on health in the first two years of the Sixth Plan period. Continue reading Larger allocations to help education and health sectors