Pakistan has again sought a loan of $650 million from the World Bank to improve education, health and water conditions while a portion of the money will be spent on the disaster management in the country.At least $300million will be spent in low-performing districts of Punjab to ensure enrolment of one million out-of-school children besides capacity building of the government schoolteachers. The project will support and encourage thousands of students by providing them vouchers to attend low-cost private schools. The conditions of the government schools will also be improved while stipends will be offered to female students to improve their quality of early childhood education.At least $200 million will be spent to improve water conditions in Balochistan.
There are not two opinions that education and health conditions in the country are far below the acceptable standards. However, a new trend has been adopted by the policymakers for the last few years that they prefer to launch so-called development projects by obtaining loans from the international donor agencies. The government obtains the money after committing to the donors agencies that it will enforce certain amount of indirect taxes and duties on the common man to generate extra bucks which will enable it to pay the markup and return the loan. As a result, the common man is some time forced to pay indirect taxes more than the actual price of a product he purchases. Now the government has obtain over half of the billion dollars loan which will increase the cost of education and health facilities in the country. As the population has been increasing at a fast rate, availability of potable water is dwindling, especially in urban areas of the country.People are already made to pay heavy bills against sub-standard utilities in the country.
Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, who is also deputy prime minister, will have to reshuffle his staff to make better policies. The first priority of the government should be to rid the country of loans, but the burden is, instead, piling up and has already reached a breaking point. The concentration of the present government is only to extract more and more revenues from the people without facilitating the business community. The amount and rates of taxes are increasing in the country on every passing day but the government has failed to come up with a concrete plan to improve the economy. Exports of the country are falling, industry is on the verge of collapse, agriculture is giving bleak performance and the government is seemed to be interested only in its face-lifting.
