Focusing on Human Development

The real challenge in Pakistan

In Human Development Report of 2015 released by UNDP, out of 188 countries and other UN-recognised territories such as Hong Kong, Pakistan stands at 147^th number with a Human Development Index (HDI) value of 0.538 indicated by the results of 2014. The country falls in the low human development category, even lower than Nepal at 0.548, Bangladesh at 0.570, India at 0.609, Sri Lanka at 0.757 and even Palestine at 0.677. Not only are Sri Lanka, India and Nepal above us in the ranking, they have improved one point as compared to where they were last year and are constantly advancing.

Pakistani economist Mehboob-ul-Haq, in collaboration with Indian Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, developed HDI – a composite statistic to measure factors such as health (life expectancy at birth), education (expected and mean years of schooling) and gross national income per capita – in 1990 to categorize countries into low, medium and high ranks and hence labeling countries as underdeveloped, developing and developed. My heart is gladdened to know that Pakistani economist has his contribution in it – an indelible mark in the history of the world. But at the same time my heart is saddened when I see Pakistan in the low human development index category.

Government priorities and focus determines where countries are going to be in the upcoming years. The UNDP report of HDI clearly shows that we lack in human development. It means that our priorities were different in the previous years. All the bridges, roads and underpasses seem very nice to show the graph of the country’s progress and have actually improved the (explicit) image of Pakistan. The requirement of infrastructure, construction and transportation in our country is a necessity that cannot be negated; but another challenge (of equal importance, if not bigger) that should be of high priority is health, jobs and education sector. There are two divergent mindsets in the Pakistan camp; one is of the view that government should focus only on health, job creation and education, whereas the second approach says that priority investment should be made on national energy supply and infrastructure.  Now the question is how to take both challenges together, because there is a third approach that also exists which says that government should balance the former two approaches but they don’t know “how”.

As far as the infrastructure is concerned, government should work on the policy of build-operate-transfer (BOT) in which private or public entity finance, design, construct and operate a project, let’s say motorway, and after recovering the investment (plus a certain amount of return) transfers the project to government to run further. According to Wealth X and UBS World Ultra Wealth Report 2014, 465 personalities falling in the Ultra High Net Worth Index (UHNWI) containing total wealth of around $55 billion live in Pakistan. Government should bring all the UHNW on table and encourage them to invest (adopting the strategy of BOT) in Pakistan, with the agenda of making Pakistan self-reliant and to not be dependent on unreliable foreign aid. This way projects get completed and both public and private parties retain involvement. BOT is a business model that has been successfully adapted by other countries too like Thailand, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, Malaysia, Canada, Australia, to name a few.

This way the major part of the budget that would otherwise be spent on infrastructure, would be invested, unlike the current situation, for the betterment of health, literacy rate and basic human rights, not to show to the world that we have improved in the ranking of HDI, but for the real progress of our very own people. The government of Pakistan should focus on bettering the quality of education, and youth – the major disappointment of our country due to joblessness – should be given work opportunities in the sectors sustained by government, private and public entities.

The results attached with the improvement in the sectors discussed above are phenomenal and would substantially lessen honor killings and illiteracy, and would give rise to gender equality, job creations and an overall positive mindset.

This way, balancing both the approaches of our people, Pakistan will mount the heights of progress and achieve unparalleled prosperity.