ISLAMABAD, Nov 22: The Planning Commission released here on Friday “Pakistan Human Development Condition 2002” report which agrees with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that poverty increased during 1990s, and calls upon the government to increase the minimum wage rate from Rs2,500 to Rs3,150 per month.

This fairly critical report has been finalised by the Centre for Research on Poverty Reduction and Income Distribution housed in the Planning Commission established in January 2002 as an autonomous body with its own board of directors.

Earlier, the ministry of labour had proposed Rs3,000 per month minimum wages for the labourers but it was not accepted by the industrialists. However, after lot of persuasion, the private sector eventually agreed to Rs2,500 per month as minimum wages for labourers.

The report also believes that the legal applicability of the minimum wage should be extended to cover the non-formal sector, which provides 64 per cent of total employment in Pakistan. It further says that since the take-home pay of lower level (grade-1) government servants is below the household poverty line, consideration should be given to formally linking it to the evolving household poverty line after adjusting for average number of earners per household in the Rs2,501-Rs4,000 income group, in conjunction with the on-going right-sizing of the public sector.

There has been a lot of criticism about the poor social indicators in Pakistan. A latest draft report of the World Bank and the ADB officials maintain that poverty has been increasing in Pakistan even beyond 1990s. However, the present government does not agree with both the donor agencies and says that poverty has stopped spreading because of various measures that had been taken during the last three years.

The report also recommends that education for all (EFA) and health for all (HFA) should be fully funded so that Pakistan does not add another event to its long history of failure in implementing educational programmes for primary, secondary, tertiary levels, and programmes for adult literacy. This is also the recommendation made by the President’s Task Force on Human Development.

Similarly, the report proposes that the science and technology programme of the country should also be fully funded by the government to enable the creation of a sustainable domestic science community over the shortest possible period (say 10 years). “Pakistan’s GNP and export growth, its economic development itself will grind to a halt without such a domestic scientific capacity,” the report warns, adding that funding for research and development should also be increased from 0.2 per cent to 1.0 per cent of the GNP over a 10-year period.

The report points out that there is a need to have focus strategy and actions to eliminate gender gaps in education (primary-middle to tertiary) as soon as possible.

This will require significant institutional strengthening of the education and health ministries and provincial departments.

“Resources should be provided to enable this management change,” it says.

The report focuses on the issues of the measurement of deprivations faced by the poor in physical and economic access to food, education, health, environment, safe drinking water and sanitation along with gender inequality.

On the measurement front, the report suggests that the official “poverty line” be replaced by the “poverty bands” so as to articulate specific policies that address the needs of the vulnerable poor, the transient and the absolute poor.

On the policy front, it highlights three critical priorities that the reform programme should incorporate: social safety net creation, human development and well-coordinated rural strategy along with good governance.

The report suggests that the issues of governance are at the heart of many of the difficulties encountered in mitigating poverty and broadening access to social access to social services for the poor.

The report calls for undertaking significant reforms in Pakistan’s institutions of governance, political, civil service, judicial and corporate in order to remove poverty, increase employment and provide better health care and education to the people.

“Rule of law requires both the presence of socially accepted laws and the institutional capacity to implement them justly,” the report observes.

“These are complex transformations and will require political will and consistent policies. Any transformation which requires asset and opportunity redistribution is resisted by the vested interest which can only be overcome through political will expressed through credible democratic systems of governance”, it adds.

The report points out that head count ratio indicates that in 1998-99, 30.6 per cent of Pakistan’s population was experiencing absolute poverty on a daily basis.

To counter poverty, the report says the key lesson is that Pakistan needs to further develop its institutional capacity for measuring and monitoring the impact of its policies and actions on the specified output and outcome indicators.