Azhar Rashid Khan

Pakistan’s Constitution guarantees education as a fundamental right. Article 25-A requires the State to “provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years in such manner as may be determined by law” (Constitution of Pakistan, 1973, art. 25-A). Article 38(d) directs the State to “provide basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, housing, education and medical relief” to citizens who are unable to earn a livelihood through infirmity, sickness or unemployment (art. 38(d)). Both commitments are commonly qualified by resources. Article 2(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) calls for progressive realisation “to the maximum of its available resources,” and Pakistan’s declaration on ratification in 2008 restated that formula (Bayefsky, n.d.). More than five decades after the Constitution’s adoption, the condition of Pakistan’s children and citizens shows how little that promise has delivered. A recent policy review reports that between 25.1 million and 26 million school-age children are out of school, making Pakistan home to the world’s second-largest out-of-school population (The News, 2026a). UNICEF estimates 25.1 million children aged 5–16 are not attending school (UNICEF, n.d.), and Save the Children reports that more than one in three children, some 26 million, are excluded from education (Save the Children, 2025). Official household data point to a lower figure, as Part II discusses. On health, the joint WHO–World Bank 2025 global monitoring report shows Pakistan’s universal health coverage service index rising from 40 in 2015 to just 56 in 2023, against a global target of 80 by 2030 (WHO EMRO, 2025). In 2024, 14.8 million people still faced catastrophic health expenditure, and 11.1 million were pushed below the $2.15-a-day poverty line by out-of-pocket medical costs (WHO EMRO, 2025). Yet public spending on education and on health each stood at only 0.8% of GDP in FY2025 (The News, 2026a; Ministry of Finance, 2026). On this evidence, the resource proviso no longer works as a justification. It reads as an admission that the State has chosen to divest from its constitutional obligations. This essay argues that such sustained, deliberate neglect substantially erodes the State’s claim to legitimacy.

I. The Legal Obligation: More Than an Aspiration

Pakistan ratified the ICESCR on 17 April 2008 (Courting the Law, 2015). Under Article 2(1), progressive realisation is not a licence for indefinite delay. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) has said that the steps a State takes should be “deliberate, concrete and targeted as clearly as possible” toward the Covenant’s obligations, that the undertaking to take steps is immediate, and that such steps must begin within a reasonably short time (CESCR, 1990, paras. 2, 9).

Retrogression is treated more strictly still. Any deliberately retrogressive measure requires the most careful consideration and must be fully justified by reference to the totality of the Covenant’s rights and the full use of the State’s maximum available resources (CESCR, 1990, para. 9). For education specifically, the Committee has added that there is a strong presumption of impermissibility and that the burden of proof rests with the State (CESCR, 1999, para. 45). Pakistan’s 2008 declaration, though styled a reservation, restates Article 2(1) and therefore offers no additional shelter. It nonetheless drew formal objections from other States parties, including the Slovak Republic (Bayefsky, n.d.).

The domestic position is firmer for education than for health. Article 25-A, inserted by the Eighteenth Amendment in 2010, is a fundamental right and carries no express resource qualifier. Article 38(d), by contrast, belongs to the Principles of Policy, which Article 29(2) makes subject to the availability of resources and Article 30(2) places beyond judicial enforcement. It is also confined to citizens unable to earn a livelihood through infirmity, sickness or unemployment. Article 38(d) therefore supports a claim of State responsibility but cannot carry the argument alone. The stronger case rests on Article 25-A, Article 9 and Pakistan’s treaty commitments taken together. Courts have also read education into the right to life: the Sindh High Court held education to be a fundamental right under Articles 9, 14, 18 and 20, read with Article 37(c), in Imdad Hussain v Province of Sindh (PLD 2007 Karachi 116).

II. The Empirical Reality: A Half-Century of Failure

Outcomes confirm the gap between obligation and performance. Pakistan ranks 168th of 193 countries on the 2025 Human Development Index, within the “low human development” category (UNDP, 2025), and is one of only two South Asian countries in that category, the other being Afghanistan (Dawn, 2025a). Its SDG Index score of 57.0 falls well below the regional average of 66.5 (Pakistan Observer, 2025), and it ranks lowest among its South Asian peers (UNDP Pakistan, 2025).

Estimates of educational exclusion differ. Save the Children’s 2025 figure is 26 million children, or 38% of the school-age population, with some 75% of girls in Balochistan excluded (Save the Children, 2025; Daily Times, 2025). The Economic Survey 2025-26, however, reports that the out-of-school share fell from 38% in 2023 to 28% in 2025 (Dawn, 2026a), and a household survey summarised by the European Union Agency for Asylum implies roughly 20 million children (EUAA, 2026). Even on the official figure, more than a quarter of school-age children are outside school. Literacy among those aged ten and above is 63%, with female literacy at 54% and Balochistan at 49% (Dawn, 2026a). On health, life expectancy is about 67.5 years (Express Tribune, 2025a).

The fiscal record is equally stark. Public expenditure on education was Rs962 billion in FY2025, or 0.8% of GDP (ProPakistani, 2026), and on health Rs942.2 billion, also 0.8% of GDP (Ministry of Finance, 2026), against a global benchmark of 4% of GDP for education (Malala Fund, 2025). The federal education allocation fell by 44%, from Rs103.8 billion in FY2024–25 to Rs58 billion in FY2025–26, on the Malala Fund’s calculation (Malala Fund, 2025). Other accounting places the FY2025–26 figure at Rs168.51 billion, a 12% fall (The News, 2026b). The FY2026–27 allocation of Rs194.13 billion is the highest in nominal terms since 2010–11, yet recurrent spending declined by almost 5% in real terms (The News, 2026b). The record is therefore one of stagnation and sharp volatility, with a partial nominal recovery in the latest budget, rather than uninterrupted decline.

III. Resource Misallocation: The “Available Resources” Defence Collapses

The resource-scarcity defence is difficult to sustain beside Pakistan’s spending priorities. The FY2024–25 defence budget stood at Rs2.122 trillion, a 17.62% increase (Business Recorder, 2024). In October 2024 the Economic Coordination Committee approved a further Rs45 billion supplementary grant for defence-services projects, on top of roughly Rs60 billion approved weeks earlier for Operation Azm-i-Istehkam (Dawn, 2024). The FY2025–26 defence allocation rose by about 20% to Rs2.55 trillion, which the Finance Minister called “the most important priority of the government” (Arab News, 2025a). A further Rs50 billion technical supplementary grant, approved in November 2025, was intended to strengthen border security, upgrade naval bases and continue protecting the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (Express Tribune, 2025b). By comparison, the federal education allocation for FY2025–26 was Rs168.51 billion (The News, 2026b), roughly one-fifteenth of the defence allocation (author’s calculation). Education is chiefly a provincial function, so this comparison understates total public spending on schooling, but it indicates relative priority.

Debt servicing compounds the squeeze. It absorbed 89% of net federal revenue receipts in FY2025, according to the Finance Ministry’s briefing to a National Assembly committee (Profit, 2025b), and accounts for 46.7% of federal outlay in FY2025–26 (Profit, 2025a). An Observer Research Foundation analysis finds that defence and debt servicing together consume almost all federal revenue (Observer Research Foundation, 2025).

This is not simply a shortage of funds. It reflects a choice to prioritise non-basic expenditure over constitutionally and treaty-mandated rights. A State that pleads inability to fund schools and clinics while approving billions in supplementary military grants has difficulty satisfying the “maximum of available resources” standard (ICESCR, art. 2(1); CESCR, 1990, para. 9).

IV. The Legitimacy Question: A Broken Social Contract

The UNDP argues that a State’s legitimacy rests on honouring the entitlement to basic services through governance systems designed to deliver it, and not merely as an aspiration (UNDP, 2025).

Institutional design has compounded the failure. The Eighteenth Amendment devolved health and education to the provinces, but in practice this has often produced coordination failures rather than better delivery. Corruption and weak controls divert even the funds that are allocated. The Auditor General’s report on Sindh flagged irregularities of Rs62.5 billion in health and Rs49.2 billion in school education, citing suspicious procurement, fake vouchers, fraudulent hiring, fake teacher attendance and non-functional schools, although the provincial government described these as preliminary observations (The News, 2025). At the federal level, an earlier audit brief identified 349 ghost schools in the Basic Education Community Schools programme (Dawn, 2016), a 2026 audit found Rs3.41 billion of irregularities in bodies under the National Health Services ministry (Dawn, 2026b), and a further audit reported that over Rs122 billion in Global Fund health assistance was lost, missed or underused (The Nation, 2026).

Critics also argue that recent constitutional changes have weakened the courts’ capacity to hold the executive to account. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment, which received presidential assent on 13 November 2025, created a Federal Constitutional Court. Amnesty International, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute and others contend that it expands executive influence over judicial appointments and further erodes an independence already weakened by the Twenty-Sixth Amendment of October 2024 (ANI, 2026; IBAHRI, 2025). Two Supreme Court judges resigned in protest (ANI, 2025). The government’s ministers, and some lawyers, reply that the reform is overdue and will improve governance and judicial efficiency (Arab News, 2025b). Where avenues of redress narrow, constitutional rights risk becoming nominal.

V. Conclusion

Progressive realisation was never meant to excuse more than five decades of inaction. Chronic underinvestment, episodes of retrogressive spending and the diversion of resources toward non-basic expenditure together suggest deliberate neglect rather than good-faith constraint, even allowing for the partial nominal recovery in the latest federal education budget. The State has prioritised strategic and military expenditure while allowing its constitutional and international obligations on health and education to go largely unfulfilled. A State that fails to deliver the core entitlements underpinning the social contract, and that actively divests from them, forfeits a significant measure of its claim to legitimate governance.

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The author is former Addl. Inspector General of Police, Pakistan.