ISLAMABAD, Nov 5: The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have asked the government to arrest and reverse the rising poverty trends by allocating more resources and ensuring prudent spending both at the federal and provincial level.
Informed sources told Dawn here on Wednesday that both lending agencies had expressed their concern over rising poverty and asked the government to tackle the issue on a priority basis by increasing rural incomes through raising agricultural productivity.
Both the donors also pleaded for removing genuine problems of the private sector with a view to maximising job creation. And this job creation, the donors believed, could not be achieved without eliminating unnecessary rules and regulations.
They also reportedly offered all possible additional financial and technical support to help develop globally competitive work force.
The sources said the World Bank and the Asian Bank had been saying that poverty was on the rise and now the State Bank in its annual report had also admitted that poverty had risen from 20 per cent to 33 per cent.
“Although there is no fresh official data available about the issue, we estimate that poverty has been rising beyond 2001 level,” said a source in a local donor agency.
He regretted that the officials of the finance ministry had been rejecting the “accurate findings” of the statistics division on poverty-related indicators.
He said without increasing spending on social sectors and by re-engineering the delivery of social services, it would be difficult to make quantum difference to the quality of life of the common man in all the four provinces.
“This is one of our concerns that the budgeted resources do not in fact reach the targeted population in a sustainable manner and that is why poverty is still on the increase,” he said.
“Now the donors are expecting an early finalization of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and we would see how the government plans to address the poverty issue,” he asserted.
The sources said Finance Secretary Naveed Ahsan presided over a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the finalization of full PRSP and was told by the Planning Commission officials that there was no data available beyond 2001 to gauge the level of poverty in the country. The statistics division had reportedly stopped compiling poverty data after 2001 when faced resistance from the higher officials.
The sources said no survey was conducted by the statistics division in 2002 and 2003 to measure poverty-related indicators.
Earlier, a household integrated survey conducted by the statistics division was endorsed by an official committee headed by Pakistan Institute of Development Economics president Dr A.R. Kamal.
The government now seems to agree with the Dr Kamal committee that average consumption of calories per day is 2,550 and not 2,350 and that poverty stands at 32.1 per cent in Pakistan.
According to the World Bank, Pakistan’s 20-year-old programme of redistributing wealth through Zakat and Ushr is yet to reach more than two million beneficiaries in any year. Only about half of the direct payments being made, go the poorest of the poor.
