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Pakistan Announces Increase in Education
Budget
By
Shailaja Neelakantan
Issue
cover-dated May 13, 2008
Pakistan’s prime minister, Syed Yousuf
Raza Gillani, announced on Monday that the government would
increase its education budget to 4 percent of the gross national
product over the next three years, with about 30 percent of
the money going toward higher education, according to a local
news report.
In recent years, Pakistan has put a
lot of money and effort into improving its higher-education
system, although even now higher education accounts for less
than 1 percent of the gross national product.
The reforms have been controversial,
however, with critics saying that they have led to corruption,
plagiarism, and favoritism. At the heart of the criticism has
been the national Higher Education Commission, formed by President
Pervez Musharraf in 2002 to regulate public universities.
In a separate news report, another
local newspaper quoted an unnamed Ministry of Education official
as saying that control of the commission would be handed over
to the education ministry, rather than report directly to the
president.
Ahsan Iqbal, the education minister, has been an outspoken critic
of Mr. Musharraf and believes that putting the commission directly
under the education ministry would deal with some of those problems
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