Pakistan’s prime minister, Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani, announced on Monday that the government would increase its education budget to 4 percent of the gross national product over the next three years, with about 30 percent of the money going toward higher education, according to a local news report.

In recent years, Pakistan has put a lot of money and effort into improving its higher-education system, although even now higher education accounts for less than 1 percent of the gross national product.

The reforms have been controversial, however, with critics saying that they have led to corruption, plagiarism, and favoritism. At the heart of the criticism has been the national Higher Education Commission, formed by President Pervez Musharraf in 2002 to regulate public universities.

In a separate news report, another local newspaper quoted an unnamed Ministry of Education official as saying that control of the commission would be handed over to the education ministry, rather than report directly to the president.

Ahsan Iqbal, the education minister, has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Musharraf and believes that putting the commission directly under the education ministry would deal with some of those problems. —Shailaja Neelakantan