LAHORE: The Punjab Finance Department has released a budget of Rs37 billion to the School Education Department.
The budget has been issued by the Punjab Finance Department to the District Education Authorities, and has been released for the salaries of teachers and the operational expenses of schools.
Separately, the School Education Department will launch a School Meal Programme at a cost of Rs6.87 billion. Under the programme, 1,028,000 students will receive milk on three days and milk along with biscuits on one day.
Chief Minister Punjab Maryam Nawaz has granted formal approval for the launch of the meal programme in 7,294 schools. The School Meal Programme will begin next month, in September.
During the current financial year, the School Meal Programme will be launched in 13 districts of Punjab. In 2023-24 the programme was started in three districts, while in 2024-25 it was extended to 13 districts. Milk and biscuits will again be provided in 13 districts during the current financial year.
The districts concerned include Bahawalnagar, Bhakkar, Chiniot, Dera Ghazi Khan, Kot Addu, Layyah, Lodhran, Mianwali, Muzaffargarh, Rahim Yar Khan, Rajanpur, Taunsa and Vehari.
The selection of districts follows a clear geographic logic. The list is drawn overwhelmingly from southern Punjab and the Thal belt — areas that consistently record the province’s weakest indicators on child nutrition, school enrolment and retention. Kot Addu and Taunsa are among the districts more recently carved out of Muzaffargarh and Dera Ghazi Khan respectively, and their inclusion extends coverage across administrative units in the same region.
School feeding programmes are designed to address two objectives at once. The first is nutritional: providing a daily protein source to children in areas with high rates of stunting and micronutrient deficiency. The second is educational, since the provision of a meal creates an incentive for attendance and has been associated internationally with improved enrolment and reduced dropout, particularly among girls and among children from households where the opportunity cost of schooling is high.
The routing of the operational budget through District Education Authorities reflects the devolved structure established under Punjab’s local government framework, under which the authorities are responsible for the management of schools within their districts, including staffing, maintenance and day-to-day expenditure. Salary disbursement constitutes the dominant share of recurrent education spending in the province.
Timely release of these funds matters for reasons that extend well beyond payroll. Non-salary operating budgets cover utilities, minor repairs, cleaning and basic teaching materials, and delays in their disbursement typically manifest at school level as deferred maintenance and unpaid utility bills.
At Rs6.87 billion for just over a million students, the meal programme works out to a per-student allocation of roughly Rs6,680 for the year, covering four servings per week across the academic calendar.
The programme’s expansion trajectory — from three districts to 13 — indicates a phased approach, with coverage stabilising at the current level for a second consecutive year rather than expanding province-wide.
-Reported by Qaiser Khokhar
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