- Will take a Herculean effort to clean the Augean’s Stables
Pakistan is going to elections in a couple of weeks. The outgoing federal government has already presented the annual budget for the year 2018-19 despite protests from the opposition, since the budget will be applicable for the entire fiscal year while the government is ending its term by end of May 2018. This provides an irrational presentation and will place severe constraints on the new government when it is sworn in after the elections of 2018.
Keeping aside the objections, let us examine the socio economic indicators since the next budget is based on them.
For a country which has been in the eye of the storm of terror attacks, suffers from violent extremism and acute intolerance, faces double digit population growth which confounds Malthusian studies, has a colossal youth bulge, and shrinking economy, also finds it difficult to combat militancy. It is no rocket science that militancy and extremism are directly proportional to governance and service delivery to masses. In this milieu, any sincere government would put aside its political differences and focus on enhancing governance and provide an institutional response to the pressing issues depicted by the socio economic indicators.
Let us begin with the state of the economy itself. Savings rate has dropped from 14.7pc to 13.1pc compared to saving rates of 29pc, 30pc and 45pc o for India, Bangladesh and China, respectively, for the same period. Pakistan’s exports have descended 13pc in the last three years while imports jumped by 16pc in the same timeframe, rising to a staggering $48.5 billion currently. Local industries are unable to compete with external ones because Pakistan is flooded with cheap imports thereby rendering the local workforce jobless. Pakistan’s external debt is expected to rise from $93.4 billion this fiscal year to $145 billion by 2023. This is a jump by 50pc in five years.
Population growth is a bombshell on which Pakistan has been sitting for decades and no government has given serious thought to this problem. Resultantly, today Pakistan is the fifth most populous nation only behind India, China, USA and Indonesia
A country’s progress is judged by its level of education. This too tells a grim story. In the essential field of education, 22.6 million Pakistani boys and girls are outside the sphere of educational institutions. These cover around 44pc of all children in the country. 43pc of government run schools are in dangerous or dilapidated condition, lacking basic amenities like furniture, bathrooms, boundary walls, electricity and so on. Pakistan’s literacy rate too paints a dismal picture. Amidst the SAARC countries, it stands sixth with a literacy rate of 55pc where Maldives enjoys a literacy rate of 99pc, Sri Lanka 98.1pc, India 74.4pc and Nepal 66pc. Interestingly, Pakistan spends half as much as India does on education.
As for unemployment and brain drain, almost two million people are being added to the workforce annually but the addition of jobs is way below this figure. According to the Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development, over the past five years, around 2.765 million have left the country in search of greener pastures, having been disappointed by the lack of opportunities at home. More than 70 million people live below the poverty line in Pakistan, earning less than $2 per day.
In the area of digital innovation and books’ publication, according to the Global Information Technology report of 2016, Pakistan stands at 110 out of 139 countries in digital innovation. As per Global Innovation Index, Pakistan ranks 119 out of 128. Pakistan’s prowess in Research and development (R&D) is equally depressing. Share expenditure for R&D in Pakistan is an insignificant 0.29pc whereas UNESCO recommends at least one percent. Books published per year ranks India among the top three countries in Asia and Middle East with 90,000 books per annum. The World Culture Score Index shows India is the leading country in reading with 10.42 hours per week. Pakistan fails to find a position even in the top thirty.
Provision of health facilities should be the prime concern of every government. In Pakistan, around 78pc of population is paying for health expenditures out of their own pockets. As per estimate, there are 145,797 doctors, 10,693 dentists and 55,165 nurses, who are registered to take care of a population of over 200 million. Thus only two doctors, one dentist and eight nurses are tending 1,000 patients. This is in sharp contrast to our actual requirement of 194,201 doctors, 159,307 dentists and 1.4 million nurses as per international standards.
Provision of drinking water is another weak area. Eighty percent of the population in Pakistan does not have access to safe drinking water. Seventy two percent water supply schemes are functional but eighty two percent of these are supplying contaminated water. The shrinking flow of rivers, mainly due to India’s interference in our water sources and Pakistan’s poor water management have led to this bleak outlook. Over eighty percent of irrigation is consumed by agriculture. The latter contributes over twenty five percent of GDP and employs fifty percent of the labour force. Additionally, housing sanitation, transportation, urbanisation and population explosion are some of the major problems in the country.
Population growth is a bombshell on which Pakistan has been sitting for decades and no government has given serious thought to this problem. Resultantly, today Pakistan is the fifth most populous nation only behind India, China, USA and Indonesia. Sixty percent of the population is under the age of thirty with limited job opportunities. While other Muslim countries like Iran and Bangladesh have successfully managed to control their population growth, Pakistan remains oblivious to this ticking bomb. The curb on population growth by Bangladesh and Iran is reflective of their improved human development indicators.
Talking of Human Development Index, Pakistan is ranked 147th in the Human Development Index with close to 30pc of the population living below the poverty line as mentioned above. Rapid urbanisation is further proving to be a bane as the cities are already bursting at the seams. Their infrastructure is coming under tremendous pressure day by day as the exodus to urban area and lack of civic amenities rises.
The problem is that successive governments have been fudging the figures and try to present a rosier picture than the factual one. Even with the optimism shown by the outgoing government in its data released on the eve of the presentation of the annual budget 208-19, Pakistan’s GDP growth was depicted as 5.6pc. Compare this with that of figures released by Asian Development Bank for India, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Maldives, which are 7.3pc, 7.1pc, 7.0pc and 6.7pc respectively.
The task for the next government will be gargantuan if it wants to pull Pakistan out of the morass of deprivation and poverty. It will necessitate a Herculean effort to clean the Augean’s Stables.