In the budget speech for FY 2013-14 the newly elected Finance Minister had promised to resolve the circular debt crisis within sixty days. The first of the series of the installments, worth Rs. 326 billion to resolve the circular debt, was released after eighteen...

Ashfaque, a retired EDO and an ex-head teacher, still recalls his long battle at the Punjab courts, lasting for two years from 1999 to 2001, with vivid details and strong emotions. He was one of the many head teachers who were retired from service...

The federal government has taken the easy route of levying higher taxes on those who are already in the tax net without targeting those high-income earners who under-report their incomes or manage to remain outside the income tax net. This policy of squeezing taxpayers...

By and large, the quality of education in Pakistan is poor. But it is not uniformly poor. Some schools are worse than others. If we were to think of the school education system as a pyramid with a few elite schools (public as well...

These days education research is increasingly becoming coincident with policy research. In fact, a reviewer’s comments on one of the papers I co-authored went like this: It did not deserve to be published because it was not policy relevant. Upshot: It was bad research...