“Education for Sale or the Annihilation of the Poor ? Pakistan’s Dying Government Public Education System”

Mian Adeel Ashraf

Article 25-A of the Constitution of Pakistan explicitly binds the state to provide “free and compulsory education” to all children aged 5 to 16. Yet, the gravest tragedy of our time is that education—once a fundamental constitutional right—has mutated into the most expensive and crushing burden on a household’s budget amidst skyrocketing inflation. While citizens are heavily taxed at every turn, their basic rights are systematically stripped away. Today, impoverished parents face an impossible choice: paying the electricity bill, buying basic rations, or funding their children’s schooling. Abdicating its core constitutional duty, the state is outsourcing the public education apparatus to private contractors. This dangerous shift is nothing short of a precursor to the total elimination of free education for the poor. A glance at the educational landscape across Pakistan’s four provinces reveals a uniformly alarming and heartbreaking crisis.
In Punjab, widely considered the country’s educational nerve center, an estimated 12 million children are already out of school. Instead of solving this crisis through state infrastructure, the Government of Punjab is handing public schools over to NGOs and private contractors under the guise of Public-Private Partnerships. Concurrently, permanent posts for government teachers are being abolished. Once education is surrendered to private hands, it transitions from a public good into a commercial enterprise. Stripping teachers of job security will inevitably degrade instructional quality. Under the pretext of miscellaneous funds and hidden charges, the right to free education will slowly but surely be snatched away from destitute families.
In Sindh, the public education system has long been laid to rest. In rural areas, thousands of “ghost schools” exist only on paper. Backed by political patronage, the teachers assigned to these schools pocket hefty monthly salaries while sitting comfortably at home or living abroad. Some even serve as personal staff at the outhouses (Otaqs) of local feudal lords. On the ground, these school buildings do not house students; instead, they have been converted into stables and cattle pens for the livestock of influential elites. The poor children of Sindh are being sacrificed at the altar of a brutal feudal system. Awareness and education are deliberately suppressed to ensure the poor remain shackled in generational servitude, leaving the feudal class to rule indefinitely without opposition.
Balochistan, the country’s largest province by landmass but most impoverished by resource allocation, suffers from a completely paralyzed educational framework. In most districts, school buildings simply do not exist. Where structures do stand, basic necessities like clean drinking water, electricity, boundary walls, and functional toilets are entirely absent. Middle and high schools are spaced miles apart, forcing young girls, in particular, to drop out permanently after primary school. Rampant teacher absenteeism and the brazen embezzlement of educational budgets have condemned the province’s youth to a bleak and dark future.
While previous administrative reforms initially placed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in a slightly better position than Sindh and Balochistan, it still lags behind Punjab and faces severe structural bottlenecks. In the Merged Districts (formerly FATA) and remote mountainous terrains, literacy rates—especially among girls—remain abysmal. A chronic shortage of educators, the lingering trauma of terrorism on school infrastructure, and severe funding deficits in recent years have left the public education framework under immense strain.
Education is not a commercial corporation where “cost-cutting” measures should dictate operations; it should be the sole responsibility of the state. The flawed educational policies implemented uniformly across the country prove that the ruling elite intends to keep the children of the poor uneducated and dependent. When governments abolish teaching posts and lease out departments to private contractors, where will the children of the poor go? Will they be left at the mercy of private school owners? The irony remains that while private schools financially exploit desperate parents through exorbitant fees, the instructors they hire are often less qualified and lower paid than those in the government sector. The public is being systematically hollowed out of its basic rights. If this trajectory continues, the total collapse of the national educational system is inevitable.
If the state possesses even a shred of sincerity toward its citizens, it must enact emergency measures immediately. The privatization and outsourcing of public schools to private contractors across all provinces, including Punjab, must be stopped. A rigorous, centralized biometric attendance system must be implemented across Punjab, KP, Sindh, and Balochistan to fire all non-practicing teachers drawing salaries at home, and illegal cattle pens must be forcefully evicted from school buildings. Provincial Public Service Commissions should be authorized to recruit permanent teachers strictly on merit, restoring job security and dignity to the teaching profession. Furthermore, federal and provincial educational funding must be escalated to at least 4% of the GDP to guarantee genuinely free and quality education for every Pakistani child.
A nation’s progress is inherently bound to the strength of its education system. If we remain silent in the face of this systemic destruction and aggressive privatization today, future generations will never forgive us. The need of the hour is not to dismantle public education or abandon it to private NGOs, but to make government institutions self-sustaining, rigorously accountable, and entirely free. Public school campuses must be upgraded to offer a clean, safe, and stimulating environment akin to elite private schools, as a healthy physical environment is critical for the cognitive and mental development of developing minds. Education is a fundamental right of the poor—it must never be reduced to a luxury reserved only for the elite.