THE government, at least at the federal level, wants to do rightsizing to show it is cutting down on expensesand achievingausterity.Ithastried to cut jobs in various places and is also working on merging departments, removing excess staff and redundancies, closing sub-departments, attached bodies, etc, and even closing down departments or at least recommending it where it can be done. But the criteria for such closures are vague, non-transparent and even open to influence, or at least that seems to be the case.

When the salaries of MNAs and ministers go up significantly, and those of the Speaker and Senate chairperson are raised `obscenely`, when the expenses of Prime Minister House and other administrative units are pushed up and many `powerful` departments continue to buy new cars and spend on things they don`t have to spend on, what logic-based criteria can be applied to determine the units to be downsized or provided with a budget increase, or to decide who qualifies for a salary hike? Should the salaries of the National Assembly Speaker and Senate chairperson have been increased in excess of a couple of million rupees a month? Especially, when they get severalperks? Can the increase in the budget of Prime Minister House be defined as productive expenditure? Whatever the case, one thing is clear: education is not much of a priority for this government. The allocation for higher education, where the federal government has always contributed the bulk, has not been raised even to match the pace of inflation, and since we have been adding new public sector universities all along, this lack of increase is hurting some universities more. In fact and this has been pointed out many times some of the older and more established public sector universities, even in Islamabad, are having trouble meeting their salary and pension obligations.

Even at the K-12 level, there does not seem tobe much of a commitment to either giving out-ofschool children access to education or improving the quality of the latter across the public sector.

This, despite the announcement of an `education emergency` by the prime minister. So, education is not a priority and it is equally clear that it is a weak sector politically as well. One should, then, not be surprised if departments or attached bodies related to education are `selected` for rightsizing and/or closure.

The impact of educational interventions, good or bad, tends to be felt in the medium to long term rather than the short term. When political horizons are short, these institutions become an easy target for decisions which result in necessary actions not being taken or the wrong measures being implemented.

One example is that of the Pakistan Institute of Education (PIE). The institute is just around three years old, and was formed when two federal sub-departments in education were merged. It has been picked for rightsizing or downsizing. About three years ago, it was felt rightly so, I think that we needed an institution at the federal level that a) collected, collated and made available educational data from all the provinces in a standardised format for researchers and policymakers; b) worked on standardising educational data across the country; c) reported data for the fulfilment of international commitments (SDGs); d) facilitated researchers and conducted policy-relevant research for the federal education set-up; and e) carried out standardised testing oflearningfor national and international monitoring as well as policy improvements.

Even though PIE has a long way to go, in less than three years it achieved a lot. A look at some of its publications (such as the Pakistan Education Statistics reports), as well as its work in the areas of standardisation, assessments and even policy research, shows the promise of such an institution. Seeing the work and possibilities one wouldhave thought the government would be thinking of making PIE autonomous and independent, creating an endowment fund for it, and facilitating it to further improve the quality of its work while urging development partners to do the same in order to have a decent high-quality data and research body in education at the federal level. Instead, it has been `selected` for rightsizing or downsizing.

This clearly has nothing to do with the worth of the work that PIE has been doing or might be doing, or the need for an institution like PIE or for research in education. It has more to do with the fact that education, as a sector, is not a priority, and PIE, as a department, is not politically resilient enough and is not backed by strong interest groups and so is an easy candidate for the guillotine. If PIE is gutted, or is left as a shell instead of being further developed, who willbe hurt? The cause of education? Research on education? The conversation on education? Who cares about all that? Clearly, not many.

On the other hand, if PIE`s budget is slashed and many jobs are cut or people fired and not replaced, someone will be able to claim they saved so many million rupees for the government. Given our short policy horizons, this will always win the day.

However, I am pretty sure that in a couple of years, someone or the other will have a brainwave, and say that we need an institution like PIE at the federal level. And then we will make all the investments all over again and go through this cycle once more. But of course we would have already wasted a number of years and the current investment as well. One wishes that the government`s decision-making process of rightsizing and downsizing was thought through. • The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Altematives and an associate professor of economics at Lums.