IN less than three years, Punjab has transferred the management of roughly thirteen thousand government schools to private operators, non-governmental organizations and individual licensees. It is among the largest recorded reassignments of public educational management in Pakistan’s history and it has advanced with little sustained public argument. On figures reported this year, schools under direct government management are contracting towards thirty-seven thousand, with further tranches of small institutions under consideration for merger or closure. Its scale alone deserves more scrutiny than it has received.

The case for it is not frivolous. Punjab inherited thousands of severely under-enrolled and single-teacher schools with a per-student cost that no finance department could easily defend. Combined federal and provincial education spending has remained below two per cent of GDP for years, against the four to six per cent benchmark commonly recommended internationally. When money is that thin, the argument that a licensee can run the same building at lower cost, with staff answerable to enrolment rather than to a distant transfer order, has force. Nor is partnership an alien import: the Punjab Education Foundation has run versions of it for two decades and the Punjab Education Initiatives Management Authority received statutory footing in 2018.

The difficulty is not that the state has contracted delivery. It is that contracting is being asked to do the work of state capacity rather........

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