ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is ranked 147 out of the 188 countries surveyed for human development, a new UN report said, bracketing it alongside South Asian neighbours, including India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal.
Pakistan has made no improvement in its ranking over the previous year though its Human Development Index rank in 2014 was 148. According to the latest annual report of the UN Development Programme i.e. Human Development Report 2016, 63 per cent Pakistanis were ‘satisfied’ with their standard of living in 2014-15.
The ranking put Pakistan it in the ‘medium human development’ bracket, which also includes India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kenya, Myanmar and Nepal. Pakistan’s HDI rank value in 2015 stood at 0.550, which had increased from 0.525 in 2010. It was 0.45 in 2000 and 0.404 in 1990.
Its life expectancy at birth stood at 66.4 years in 2015 and the Gross National Income (GNI) per capita $5,031. The report said on the perception of feeling safe, 58 per cent answered ‘yes’, while on freedom of choice, 59 per cent women respondents answered they were ‘satisfied’ compared to 58 per cent for men.
Pakistan’s score for overall life satisfaction was 4.8 on a scale of 1-10. On the perceptions about government, only 46 per cent said they had trust in the national government for the 2014-15 period, while 59 per cent said they had confidence in the judicial system.
The report called for legislation to promote gender equality for women in the country. Declaring acid attacks against women a heinous form of violence common in communities where patriarchal gender orders are used to justify violence against women, the report said in the last 15 years, more than 3,300 acid-throwing attacks had been recorded in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Colombia, Uganda and the United
Pointing out wide disparities in quality between public and private education services in many developing countries, the report said a recent review of 21 studies in Pakistan, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal and Nigeria found that students in private schools tended to achieve better learning outcomes than do students in state schools.
“Teaching is also often better in private schools than in state schools for example in Pakistan, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania.” The report called for far greater attention to empowering the most marginalised in society, and recognised the importance of giving them greater voice in decision-making processes.
The report’s lead author and director of the Human Development Report Office, Selim Jahan, said despite progress gaps, universal human development was attainable. “Over the last decades, we have witnessed achievements in human development that were once thought impossible.”
Since 1990, one billion people have escaped extreme poverty, and women’s empowerment has become a mainstream issue: while as recently as the 1990s, very few countries legally protected women from domestic violence, today, 127 countries do.
