Punjab's budget is finally spending on people, not just roads

A professional, not a lawyer, walks into parliament

The episode opens with Muzamil setting the scale of the conversation he is about to have. Punjab is 127 million people — more than half of Pakistan’s population — and 37 million of them are between fifteen and twenty-nine. The province does relatively well on literacy compared to its peers, he says, but “still there is a lot of work to be done.” His guest is Marriyum Aurangzeb, the senior minister of Punjab in Maryam Nawaz Sharif’s cabinet.

The first stretch of the conversation is biographical, and Marriyum is unusually clean about it. She did her schooling between Saint Paul’s Convent in Rawalpindi and FG College, took a master’s in economics from Quaid-i-Azam University, and then went to King’s College London — specifically because a two-month internship at IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, had pulled her toward environmental economics. The year was 2003. “Climate change तो आजकल तो is like a buzzword,” Muzamil interjects. “Exactly,” she says. She came back, joined WWF, and stayed for almost ten years before joining parliament in 2013.

Muzamil’s framing here is sharper than it looks. He notes that politics in Pakistan is usually a destination for two kinds of people: business families and lawyers. Professionals do not generally walk into the National Assembly from a job at WWF. Marriyum’s answer is partly cultural — her grandfather was a member of the first constituent assembly of 1947, her mother was a counsellor, her aunt held office — and partly a comment on the cohort she entered with. “2013 में youngest parliament थी ever,” she says. Shaza Khawaja, then teaching at LUMS, was the youngest parliamentarian. Twenty-eight of the new MNAs alongside Marriyum had professional backgrounds and foreign degrees. An editorial at the time, she remembers, called it “a younger professional parliament as compared to previous times.”

The path inside the party is the more interesting part of the story. Ayaz Sadiq, then the speaker, gave her the parliament-solarisation project; Pakistan became the first national parliament to run entirely on solar. She built the SDG secretariat, again a first. She became parliamentary secretary for interior during the peak of the national action plan against terrorism. After Dawn Leaks, when Pervaiz Rashid had to step down, she was made minister of state for information directly under the prime minister. Through all of it, she says plainly, “मिया साहब ने वह trust किया है मेरे में. तो मैं उनको किसी तरह भी disappoint ना करूं.” She is candid about the cost: replacing senior politicians as a younger woman meant working twice as hard so nobody could say “बच्ची सी लगाती है.”

The night Pakistan nearly defaulted

Muzamil pivots to the macro question — what is Pakistan, today, in 2025 — and Marriyum walks through the timeline in a way that is worth taking seriously as a primary source. The 2013 to 2018 government, she argues, inherited terrorism at its peak (eight or nine bomb blasts a day), the first IMF programme, political instability, and the 2014 dharna. By the time PML-N left office, blasts were down to one a month, inflation had touched 2.6%, the interest rate was around 3.5%, and the IMF programme had been completed.

The 2018 to 2023 period, in her telling, undid all of it. Inflation went vertical. The IMF programme had to be re-entered. And then, in 2023, the country reached the edge.

Here Marriyum tells a story that the show has not quite captured before, and Muzamil lets her tell it without interrupting. She was in a meeting in Paris with Shehbaz Sharif, Ayaz Sadiq, Sherry Rehman, and the managing director of the IMF. “She said,” Marriyum recounts, “we are not going ahead with the programme.” Pakistan was going toward default because the IMF was pulling out. “I saw Shehbaz Sahib and his expression changed to be in the meeting — you know, that was it.” For about an hour and a half Shehbaz Sharif tried to convince the managing director to reconsider. Eventually she agreed to let the technical teams meet that night. The Pakistani finance team sat with the IMF’s Washington team. Two days later the situation had completely flipped and a programme was agreed. “Difficult decision था,” Marriyum says — they were heading into elections and they knew exactly what the political cost of signing on to an IMF programme would be. “श्रबाद साहब ने कहा कि I have to go ahead.” The conversation makes a quiet but pointed claim: Pakistan’s election strategy in 2023 was traded away to keep the country solvent.

She closes the segment with the indicators she wants on the record. Inflation, she says, went from 45% to a brief negative print last month and is currently around 1.5%. The interest rate is down from 22% to 10%. For the first time, alongside the new budget, the previous year’s budget was laid in parliament with a full progress report — rupee by rupee, sector by sector, spent versus unspent.

The budget that is not about roads

Muzamil asks for the elevator pitch on the 2025-26 Punjab budget, and Marriyum gives one of the cleanest political answers in the conversation. The eighteenth amendment, she reminds him, made the provinces “states in themselves” — independent of the federal government on health, education, and most of the major subjects. “After the eighteenth amendment the provinces are empowered to make their own decisions,” she says, “and this budget that the Punjab government has laid is a very transformational budget.”

The case for why is structural. PML-N, she argues, has historically been criticised for spending on infrastructure — motorways, the Orange Line, metros, hospitals like PIC and PKLI, the Daanish schools, the Punjab Education Foundation. She takes pride in all of it. “Motorway जब बना,” she says, “Motorway ने हमारी पूरी कौम की transformation की एक नए travel तरीके पर.” But — and this is the lever the whole budget turns on — the spine is now built. The next phase has to be human development or none of the earlier investment compounds.

The numbers she gives bear this out. The single largest development allocation is health, at 180 billion rupees. Education is second at 148 billion. Water, sanitation and clean drinking water is third. Roads are not the headline for the first time in PML-N’s Punjab.

Within health, the allocation breaks down across three layers. At the primary level: 1,300 of the province’s 2,800 basic health units and rural health centres are being fully revamped, with equipment, machinery, and human resources, and the private sector is being invited to run BHUs and RHCs as unit hospitals. At the tertiary level: fourteen hospitals are being built inside what is being called the Nawaz Sharif Medical District in Lahore, after the government audited what diseases simply have no dedicated facilities in the province. At the outreach level: 911 “clinic on wheels” field hospitals were dispatched to South Punjab the day before the recording — full mobile OPDs with pharmacy, diagnostics and a neonatal facility, going door to door. Marriyum is also blunt about the politics of distribution. When a PML-N MPA complained that the field hospital had stopped outside a PTI rival’s dera, the chief minister’s reply was: “वह इंसान नहीं? उसको इलाज की, वह इलाज नहीं हो सकता?”

Within education, the headline is the 40 billion rupees ring-fenced for missing facilities — washrooms, furniture, IT labs — in schools that, in 2025, still do not have them. A scholarship programme has reached 50,000 students on merit. A laptop programme is targeting 100,000 students by December, with 40,000 already delivered. Early childhood education has been introduced in the public sector for the first time at the new Nawaz Sharif Centre for Excellence for Early Education. “मतलब कि आप यह देखो 40,000,000,000 इस्तेफ़ा सिर्फ़ missing facility,” Marriyum says.

How do you actually monitor it

This is where Muzamil applies the most useful pressure in the conversation. He raises the DOGE report on USAID money allegedly lost to ghost schools in Sindh. He raises the structural problem with any centralised system: a number in a budget book is not impact in a tehsil. “What is to say,” he asks, “कि यार number बढ़ाना तो is just ठीक है — मैं आज किताब में मैंने एक number लिख लिया, अगले साल एक और लिख लूंगा. How do you ensure that number actually ends up in those areas?”

Marriyum’s answer is the most policy-dense passage in the episode and it is worth attending to. The eighteenth amendment, she says, devolved the subjects but never built the institutions to run them. “Devolution भी हुई,” she says, “लेकिन institutionalization of devolution नहीं हुई.” That is what the current administration is now doing, sixteen years late. Three pieces stand out. First, a complete digital school-by-school, teacher-by-teacher map of the province — “अगर you’ll ask me कि गोजरा का फलाना school इसमें कितना teacher है, कितना बच्चा है, इस साल कितने क्या result, किस class — it’s all mapped.” Second, a new authority called PECTA, the Punjab Curriculum and Teacher Training Authority, that ties teacher KPI directly to student results. Third, an inspectorate that goes school to school physically and feeds back into the digital system.

The Finland story she tells here is the cleanest articulation of the model. When the ambassador of Finland visited the chief minister, Maryam Nawaz asked how Finland monitored its teachers. The ambassador’s answer was, “We don’t have a monitoring system.” The students’ results, the school’s result — those are the monitor. Marriyum is careful not to overclaim. She does not say Punjab is Finland. “I am not claiming that with this सौ फीसद Punjab का education system will be like Finland. It’s transition. It’s a mindset change, it’s a behaviour change.” On the day the policy was announced, teachers went on strike. The chief minister, she says, did not back down.

A second mechanism sits underneath this: School Management Councils, which existed on paper but were redundant. They are the parents of the children enrolled at each school. The 40 billion in missing-facility money is being released through these councils, not down a bureaucratic chain. “Government is doing investing,” Marriyum says, “but people are taking charge, parents are taking charge of the facilities, of the school.” The same logic now extends into the civil bureaucracy itself, where, “for the first time ever,” KPIs determine annual bonuses for deputy commissioners and assistant commissioners, tied to out-of-school children and the state of local health facilities.

The Mayo Hospital episode that Marriyum brings up unprompted is worth quoting. When the chief minister was criticised for saying the medical superintendent should go to jail, Marriyum’s response was uncompromising: “Doctor एक बहुत noble profession है, लेकिन वह doctor जो अपनी duty पर, अपने वक्त पर नहीं है और जो doctor मरीज़ को दवाई store में होते हुए दवाई नहीं दे रहा है, वह ठीक doctor नहीं है.” When the MS was removed, she says, the stores were full and the corridors were piled with medicines — “वह पूरा एक mafia attached था.”

Girls who got the scholarship

Muzamil opens what might be the most important section of the conversation by reframing the problem. Pakistan, he says, is moving into an age where productivity will not look like factory work. Critical thinking will matter. The country is sitting on a working-age population that the ageing West will need. And yet roughly half of Pakistanis reach eighteen having dropped out at some stage, and the South Punjab numbers are “abysmal.” Layered on top of that is a cultural problem: girls. He is specific. The morality, the spirit, the DNA of any society is shaped by women. Economies like Pakistan’s underperform precisely because women’s participation in the workforce is low.

Marriyum accepts the frame but pushes back on one piece of it. The cultural barrier, she says, is real but it is also entangled with household economics. A poor family will send the son to school and pull the daughter out, not because of pure misogyny but because the son is the assumed bread-earner. The policy answer is not a lecture; it is an opportunity that makes the household’s calculation change.

She tells the scholarships story to ground it. “जब मैंने आपको कहा था यह बच्चियां घर बैठ गई थी जिनको हमने scholarships दी थी. They were not going to — वह छोड़ रही थी इसी age में — and they were brilliant merit-based students.” She also flags the skill-development side as a structural fix the province had never built: a single Punjab department for skill development and entrepreneurship, modelled in part on China’s practice of assessing students in tenth class and routing the ones who are not academically suited into demand-driven technical streams. MoUs have been signed with international employment agencies in the UAE, Middle East and Europe, mapping what skills are actually needed where. Twenty-two thousand young Pakistanis are expected to be placed this year. A Chief Minister Parwaaz Card now covers the ticket cost for those who have the skill but cannot afford the journey.

The list of smaller interventions she runs through is not the part of the conversation that will make headlines, but it is the part that says the most about intent. E-bikes for girls. Panic buttons on bus stops. A hostel for the female employees at Lahore’s Safe City office because they were travelling long distances and renting unsafely. A mobile workshop programme that travels to tehsils, trains women in tile-fixing or sewing or rose-essence production, then gives them computers so they can sell domestically and abroad. Three hundred girls have received computers in this tranche so far. The episode that prompted it, Marriyum says, was a chief minister story about an Instagram reel — a girl in a small town whose family grew roses, who started bottling rose essence in packaged tins and exporting it.

Water, transport, and one of the longer climate moments on the show

Muzamil keeps the conversation moving into water and sanitation. The Sutra Punjab solid waste programme, Marriyum explains, is a Turkish private-sector model — Şehbaz Sharif borrowed it from a visit to Erdoğan — now running across thirteen or fourteen million people’s worth of doorstep collection. It is not just collection; it includes the full ecosystem of disposal, landfill, and a planned shift to waste-to-energy. The private sector has put 40 billion rupees of machinery in. She is candid about what they found: of Punjab’s divisions, only four had a functioning WASA. “बाकी में वासा ही नहीं है. तो वहां पर क्या हो रहा है? बस, मल्लाह का निज़ाम honestly चल रहा.”

On water itself she is careful to mark the geography. “सिंध का पानी Punjab consume नहीं करता” — a quiet pre-empt of the South Punjab water politics. The Indian threat after the recent war, she says, forced a realisation about water infrastructure that the budget now reflects: 30 billion rupees for water efficiency, separate from irrigation and agriculture. The Faisalabad sewage failure of September last year — caused by population growth past the carrying capacity of an old system — is being addressed with 12 billion rupees of trunk sewage and sanitation work.

On transport, the ART (Articulated Rapid Transit) concept is being rolled out in Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Lahore. Eleven hundred electric buses are arriving in August, with another 550 funded through a World Bank Punjab Clean Air programme specifically for the Lahore division. The piece Marriyum is most visibly excited about, however, is rail. Pakistan Railways, she says, has been ignored for decades. The Punjab government has identified nine regional routes — south to centre, centre to north — that would cover roughly eight out of thirteen crore of the relevant population. The plan is not to build new track. It is to bring the existing railway pakri back to its original state and outsource its operation. Because railway is a federal subject, the chief minister, the prime minister and the federal railway minister are working as a group on its feasibility.

The climate section is where Marriyum is most personally invested. Returning to the framing that opened the episode — that her training was in environmental economics, not politics — she calls the moment “the right time and an opportunity.” Smog, she says, is not a three-month thing; fog just makes it visible. Climate change is not the environment ministry’s problem; it is multi-sectoral, sitting across agriculture, transport, health, education, industry and planning. A wildlife force has been created for the first time. An environmental protection force is using drone surveillance instead of 1980s vehicles and Vespa motorbikes. Plastic has been banned in Punjab. The vehicle fitness certification regime that started at six spots is now at seventy-eight because of how long the queues got.

The minimum wage, the labour gap, and “zero tax”

On the minimum wage — raised to 40,000 rupees, criticised by Shahzad Saleem of Nishat — Marriyum is unembarrassed. Industry is being given large incentives in this budget under the IMF programme. Labour, with inflation as it is, “is very very important.” Her response to the compliance question Muzamil presses her on is the most quotable line in the segment: if the government’s enforcement is failing, “उसकी सज़ा नहीं मिलनी चाहिए लोगों को.” That is the worker’s penalty being paid for the state’s failure.

She also discloses something Muzamil does not push on but which is worth flagging. This is, she says, a zero-tax budget. When departments came to the chief minister with proposals to increase tax, Maryam Nawaz asked them how they were going to bring people who are outside the tax net into it. “There was silence,” Marriyum says, “because that’s a difficult thing.” The Punjab Revenue Authority was in four districts; it is now in nineteen and expanding. The instruction is unambiguous: do not raise taxes on the existing base, widen it.

Pension, e-filing, and the four-day rule

The wrap-up moves quickly through two structural reforms that, Marriyum suggests, do more for governance than any headline programme. Pension is the first. Pakistan’s pension burden, both Muzamil and Marriyum agree, is becoming unmanageable. A reform package — cycle of pension, number of years of pension, dual pension — was started in April, concluded in December, and announced with the budget. A self-funded contribution model has been introduced for new recruits. Ghost pensioners are being squeezed out by a digital register. One last-minute change the chief minister called for, in a moment Marriyum reports with some warmth: the cap on widows’ pensions was being set at ten years; it has been reversed to be lifelong.

Digital government is the second. “Cabinet and government of Punjab is completely on e-filing,” she says. “No file comes to me. No file goes to chief minister. No file goes to cabinet — it’s all digital.” E-payment runs through Punjab ePay; e-tendering covers all government procurement. The result, she claims: 911 billion rupees of utilisation last year against a previous high of 540 billion, and 55 billion rupees saved on procurement through e-tendering alone. There is a four-day legal ceiling on how long any file can sit on one official’s desk. “Four days से ज़्यादा आप अपने पास file by law नहीं रख सकते — और यहां महीनों महीने fileएं पढ़ी होती थी.”

The honest close

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil is letting Marriyum land where she wants to. The honest close is hers: “I cannot claim and chief minister has said this multiple times कि जी हमने सारे school ठीक कर दिए हैं, सारे अस्पताल ठीक कर दिए — because this is a policy shift and it will take time.” The pitch is not that Punjab is fixed. The pitch is that, for the first time after the eighteenth amendment, the province is trying to build the institutions the constitution gave it sixteen years ago. Muzamil’s response is the right one for a long-form host with a five-year horizon: “I can say कि जब हम पांच साल बाद जा रहे होंगे तो it will be different sectors.”

Whether that turns out to be true is the next conversation.