Lack of national and political commitment to education was cited as the major reason for the country's bad performance in the sec-tor at a forum held here on Wednesday.

It was the first meeting of the parliamentary forum on literacy held under its convenor Senator Razina Alam Khan. Set up as a non-profit organization by concerned members of the National Assembly and the Senate, the forum is supported by Unesco.

A working paper read at the forum showed Pakistan as low achiever amongst the regional countries.

"Countries like India, Indonesia and Bangladesh who were no better than Pakistan in the 1980's have left us far behind, as they have invested heavily in literacy and basic education. Their literacy rates range stand at 70 per cent, 67 per cent and 56 per cent respectively," the paper observed.

In contrast, Pakistan's literacy rate is 53 per cent, lowest among the nine most populated countries of the world and second lowest in SAARC.

Until 1983, budgetary allocalion for education did not exceed 1.5 per cent of the GNP against the Unesco-recommended figure of 3.2 per cent for an average developing country and 4 per cent for a model developing country.

Successive governments did initiate high-sounding policies and programmes but none were implemented in letter and spirit. The Education Policy 1998-2010 envisaged opening of 270,000 non-formal basic education schools/literacy centres but only 70 per cent are expected to come up by 2010.

The paper noted that the country lacked robust institutional framework for implementation of literacy programmes. "This is a unique predicament as no developing country could be oblivious and negligent of a proper national institutional infrastructure for implementation and monitoring of its literacy programmes," the paper underlined.

It also criticized the low level of coordination between the federal and provincial governments as far as the literacy increasing programmes were concerned.

Senator Razina Alam declared on the occasion that the main objective of the forum was to remove illiteracy and provide free and compulsory education with minimum possible time as stipulated in the Article 37(B) of the country's constitution.

"We have gathered here to make it sure that the political commitment remained there to achieve higher literacy rates in the country," she said. 

She said the Forum will work on non-party basis, taking everybody on board for the national cause, and assured that "suggestions from all sides will be welcomed".

Senator Nisar Memon called for the engagement of the National Assembly's and the Senate's standing committees on education in the forum. He asked Ms Alam to have a joint committee of the two houses chaired by her to make this forum more effective and result-oriented.

"We also have to see what other such forums are doing in the market and evaluate their progress," he said.

Dr. Rozina Tofail, Member National Assembly, was of the view that the forum has to come up with something different to achieve results.