Dr. Syeda Farhana Jahangir
PAKISTAN’S Federal Budget for FY 2026-27 has reignited a debate that strikes at the heart of our national future.
The allocation of Rs. 722.48 billion for the Benazir Income Support Programed against a mere Rs. 41.7 billion for education — a ratio of nearly 17 to 1 — raises a fundamental question: are we alleviating poverty, or inadvertently perpetuating it?
Let us be clear. Social protection programmes like BISP serve a vital humanitarian purpose, and millions of vulnerable families depend on this lifeline for their survival. However, welfare spending and education investment are not competing priorities — they are sequential ones. Cash transfers address suffering today; education eliminates its causes tomorrow.
The experience of developed nations offers a compelling lesson. The United States allocates approximately 15% of its federal budget to education and invests heavily in health and skills development — not as charity, but as a strategic bet on human capital. The philosophy is straightforward: an educated, skilled citizenry generates wealth, pays taxes, and reduces long-term dependence on state assistance. Education is not merely a social good; it is the most powerful engine of economic self-sufficiency ever devised.
Pakistan’s literacy and skills challenges are well documented. Spreading Rs. 41.7 billion across scholarships, technical education, and laboratory upgrades in 137 institutions is simply insufficient to move the needle for a population exceeding 240 million. The mathematics are unforgiving. Sustained, generous investment in education yields far greater long-term dividends than even the most well-intentioned cash transfer programme.
This is not a theoretical argument. Having conducted Train, the Trainer programmes across public universities in Pakistan and participated in the National Workshop on Higher Education at the National Academy of Higher Education in Islamabad, I have witnessed both the scale of the challenge and the transformative promise of the solution firsthand. Engagement with faculty and academic leadership across more than 90 universities reveals a consistent pattern: where structured professional development is provided, classroom quality improves, institutional culture strengthens, and student outcomes follow.
The investment required is modest. The returns are generational. The baseline of any educational quality is the teacher. On this front, the National Academy of Higher Education (NAHE) is performing its mandate with commendable efficiency, equipping faculty across Pakistan’s public universities with internationally benchmarked pedagogical skills. However, a critical gap persists: NAHE’s training initiatives remain disconnected from the formal mechanisms of promotion, induction, incentives, and performance bonuses. Teacher development, however excellent, cannot drive systemic change if it carries no institutional weight.
I would respectfully urge the Federal Government to formally adopt NAHE’s recommendations in the selection, induction, and promotion of trained teachers. Linking faculty training to career progression would transform a well-intentioned programme into a powerful, self-sustaining engine of academic excellence — one benchmarked against the very international standards Pakistan aspires to meet.
Pakistan’s universities are not short of talent. They are short of sustained institutional support, rigorous professional development, and a national policy framework that treats academic excellence as a strategic priority rather than a budget afterthought.
Pakistan. must progressively rebalance its budgetary priorities — not by abandoning the vulnerable, but by investing in the conditions that make vulnerability less inevitable. A well-educated population does not merely consume state resources; it creates them. Every rupee invested in a well-trained teacher today is a rupee saved in welfare spending a generation from now. Pakistan cannot afford to keep deferring this reckoning. The budget is a moral document. It is time ours reflected the nation we aspire to be, not simply the crisis we are managing.
—The writer is contributing columnist.
