| 11 March 2004 | Thursday | 19 Muharram 1425 |
Sweet achings of early spring
Quite a number of developing countries, including Pakistan, have made headway in achieving macro economic stability, lowering inflation and fiscal deficit and removing stagnancy from economic growth rate.
Yet almost all the reports released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) regarding the status of human development and poverty in 174 countries, based on each country's literacy rate, longevity, gender sensitivity and status regarding environmental protection have awarded low ranking to majority of Asian and African countries.
The report says that the countries striving for higher economic growth rate and macro-economic stability have not been able to get out of the clutches of poverty. It is just because of the fact that social sector was not accorded due attention despite enhanced budgetary allocations and liberal funding received from foreign agencies to achieve UN millennium development goal of halving the poverty by the year 2015.
In Pakistan, despite enhanced funds allocation for education, no significant improvement is visible in enrolment at primary level in schools nor reduction in drop-out rate.
'Education for all' programme has not gained momentum. Thus the achievement of 80 per cent enrolment target by 2005 remains a distant dream. The standard of education in state-owned schools continues to deteriorate.
On the health front, although mortality rate has considerably reduced, female mortality at reproductive age and neonatal deaths remain the highest among the developing countries.
Gender inequality is being felt with greater intensity in almost all aspects of life, despite the country being signatory to the 'Convention on Elimination of all Discrimination Against Women' (CEDAW).
Environmental degradation is going on unchecked, especially in industrial cities despite sizable funds allocation for environmental protection. As a result, poverty situation is getting worse with each passing day in the face of improved economic growth indicators.
Sizable allocation of Rs.160 billion in developmental budget and its promised future enhancement at the rate of 0.2 per cent of the GDP, if properly managed and monitored at all levels of delivery of these social services can make a difference.
Actually it is the establishment's failure to properly monitor the use of funds and infrastructure both for providing safety nets and direct service to the poor like health care, education, clean drinking water, sanitation, transport facility etc.
The Allocation of funds, on the average, amounting to 2.7 per cent of the GDP annually during the current decade is far below the minimum of four per cent prescribed by the Unesco.
On top of that, either it is misutilization of funds or negative attitudes of the providers of these services at lower levels, which has brought stagnancy in the rate of growth of literacy. Thus the target of providing education to all by 2015 seems difficult to achieve.
Despite the introduction of local government system,the monitoring of the delivery of social services to the masses has not improved. It is due to the so-called clash of interest between provincial and local governments.
The federal government being the policy-maker for education and health sector in consultation with the provincial and local governments and other relevant stake holders, who are in direct contact with public / communities, need to delegate implementation task to local governments with allocation of the budgeted funds.
In this regard it is essential that the local governments are fully authorized to reallocate the funds according to the changing needs of each sector.
The local governments in turn must ensure that service is delivered to the targeted population (poor), for which they need to do vigorous monitoring and unhindered release of funds at all levels and at each stage of the project undertaken.
The front office or front personnel (in the health sector, hospitals, doctors and field staff and in case of education, universities, directorate of education in each district, principals of colleges, schools, etc), who are directly in touch with the targeted users, for delivery of services, should have regular supply of funds and resources to offer services on continuous basis.
The newly introduced local governments, being a tier of the establishment have direct links with the users of services. Hence there is need of coordination and cooperation among local and provincial government for proper and timely utilization of the budgeted funds to achieve set targets of delivery of services relating to each component of the social sector.
It is due to lack of coordination that an initiative by the federal government to allocate a budget of Rs.160 billion for public sector developmental expenditure could not meet periodical target.
According to news items appearing on February 19, 2004 in leading dailies, during the half year between July and December, 2003, only 30 per cent of the PSDP allocations were utilized.
For social sector only 28 per cent of annual budget amount was released for the first half of the current fiscal year and even out of that only 23 per cent could be utilized. This leaves a wide gap between developmental work to be done during the first half of the year and what was actually done for the social sector.
Things cannot be left as they are. Despite political rivalries and administrative clogs, social services need to be delivered to the poor segment of the population in order to ensure success of poverty reduction programme.
Regarding the education sector priority should be to improve enrolment rate and arrest the drop-out rate in primary and secondary state-owned schools. No doubt the current fiscal budget contains sizable allocations, but it needs strict monitoring and also collaboration with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community based organizations (CBOs) which due to their presence in the rural and far-flung areas can influence the parents to send their children to schools.
Some of the NGOs headed by notable singers have ventured into eliminating child labour and providing cash incentives to financially disadvantaged parents to send their children to schools.
The next needed initiative is to improve the standard of education in public sector schools. This would be possible only by deploying qualified teachers, selected strictly on merit. The curriculum needs revision keeping in view the advancement in science and technology. In this area also public and private sector partnership is needed.
The recent move to offer public sector schools for adoption to private sector organizations and individuals has been found quite successful in improving the quality of education in government schools. The adoption does not pass on the ownership to the adopter.
The teachers remain on the pay roll of the government. However, the adopting agency or individual can induct additional teachers and monitor the performance of existing teachers by applying carrot-and-stick approach.
This can be done by providing incentives in the form of cash awards for good performance and the menace of frequent absenteeism among teachers, which is a common complaint against them, can be checked by moving education department to take disciplinary action against defaulting teachers.
The writer having association with an NGO which has adopted four government schools of kutchi abadis in Karachi has seen a significant improvement in teachers' behaviour, discipline amongst the students and above all standard of education of those schools.
The Nazims in each district / town must form teams of retired educationists for monitoring performance of public sector schools in particular through frequent scheduled as well as surprise visits.
In order to achieve UN millennium goal for eliminating gender disparity from education sector, which is more acute in the rural areas, it should be ensured that girl schools are available in sufficient number in each district.
In order to ensure that quality education is imparted in these schools, induction of teachers should be strictly on merit. The teachers residing in the cities if posted in far-flung and less developed areas must be given special incentives and facilities.
A very recent initiative of Punjab government to provide scholarship of Rs.200/- per month to girl students of state- owned schools, and similar moves in other provinces for providing free lunch, text books and uniforms to girls from financially disadvantaged families, would definitely enhance female enrolment in schools. Of late the Unesco has come forward in a big way to assist the government of Pakistan to implement all projects to improve literacy rate among women.
In the health sector, for making services accessible to the people at grassroots level, budgetary allocations need to be enhanced. Only 0.7 per cent of the GDP is spent on health and even that is not always directed to the needs of poor population. In the scenario where political patronage is the assumed norm of life, little can be expected for the betterment of the common man.
In recent years private sector has also come forward in a big way to share the responsibility of providing free health care or low cost medical facilities for the poor. Quite a number of NGOs are providing free medical check-ups, medicines and meeting all types of surgery needs free by occasionally arranging medical camps and also through their members-owned hospitals.
In order to monitor and supervise the delivery of medical services to the masses, it is advisable that "Community health councils" are formed in all towns, mohallas and villages on the pattern of the UK and other European countries, which come under the category of voluntary services.
The doctors, teachers and members of the community work as watch-dogs to find out the quality of service offered in hospitals through direct contact with patients.
The writer is a former president of First Women Bank.
Sweet achings of early spring
February is the time in Islamabad when winter first feels losing its bite. It begins to get warm in the sun. Shy for showing up before time the yellow jasmine peeps furtively from sunny corners.
An occasional shower brings a temporary chill to the morning breeze but the nip melts away by noon and myenas strut about pompously counting the few dandelions in the grass. Spring has come. The body aches with sweet pains. Desire warms the sap in the limbs. Nature takes a creative turn.
At the TVO centre, which allows sundry literati to use its conference room as well as have a complimentary cup of tea, Harris Khalique who affects an air of jaunty dilettantism but is a serious dabbler all the same, was reading a selection of late Shahryar Rashed's poems from the Collected Poems his wife Iffat has compiled, to an elite audience of Foreign Office wives and their retired and in-service husbands, that the Asian Study Group's Aamera Hameed, had gathered to launch the book.
Readings of English poetry tend to become solemn ceremonies as probably the convention is to sit motionless and as far as possible appear not to understand a word or line of the verse.
This indeed may be so but honesty of this kind besides being undiplomatic can be highly disrespectful to the poet concerned. Fortunately it was a company of the late poet's colleagues who had shared time with him in Paris - (Oh to be in Paris when. I forget the line) and could recall and share their exotic memories with the local rest of us.
One comment that came up again and again and was offered as a measure of Shahryar's personality was that he was his own man who owed nothing to Noon Meem Rashed, his and modern Urdu poetry's illustrious father.
I think it was an improper way of paying tribute to a son. In his essay My Father that he wrote for Dr Aftab Ahmad's authentic book on Rashed, which Intezar Hussain translated into Urdu and which I am here rendering back into English, he is full of tender thought and sentiment for his father and accepts with a kind of regret that "had we, brother and sister, given him a little time, he would certainly have brought us up with great care. What did I get from my father.
A lot. I could have got more. But I remained rebellious for as long as he was alive. One reason was that I avoided his shadow. Living under this shadow meant that I was Noon Meem Rashed's son and that's all." But though that was not all, it is not hard to see he became very much his father's son, a poet.
One evening Kishwar Naheed had us over for lunch that she had cooked for Jaza al-Ehsan Jaza, a poet visiting from Kenya to introduce her first collection of poetry which she had been composing all the years since the sixties when she settled down in East Africa.
Next evening her book was launched at a very well arranged function. Prof Fateh Mohammad Malik welcomed her late arrival on the scene as a pleasant change since the 'in thing' was to launch a couple of poetry collections before becoming a poet. Jaza took her time waiting for the vintage to mature.
One saw that in the deceptive simplicity of her expression. Ahmad Nadim Qasmi, in his flap note to the maiden book, also detects this absence of amateurish exercise in her verse. Then her thought also is contemporaneous embodying the basic human emotions and feelings that make poetry so relevant even in this mechanical age.
Iftikhar Arif corrected those critics who described the sense of loneliness in her verse as a poetry of exile. He said that voluntary migration to another country was different from exile and banishment or exodus of a community to another land for survival.
It was a good distinction to draw as Jaza's estrangement is something a poet could experience anywhere, in one's own country and that women in particular feel living away from home with in-laws.
What amazes one in this context is the total omission of Africa from her view. She takes no notice of its land and people among whom she has been living for the greater part of her life.
There is great poetry in that land and a strange dignity in its people that one finds missing in our own servile populace. The Blacks are a cool lot. But we have a problem of attitude.
I remember General Zia telling a gathering of Pakistanis in Zimbabwe that though the Africans were black they were good-hearted! We take this kind of thick-skinned racism for granted and hardly ever notice it. One could live with it if we stopped cringing and crawling before the Whites.
"The task before writers today is to oppose imperialism, racism, colonialism and neocolonialism and love the people of East and West and support with full force those who are struggling for freedom, democracy and human rights," said Faiz Ahmad Faiz whose birth anniversary was celebrated by the Pakistan Academy of Letters on a breezy afternoon.
"On whose side are you?" He asks the writers and tells them to distinguish between friends and enemies of the people, those who are struggling for their emancipation and those who wish to keep them enslaved.
"Are you satisfied with the creative work being done in Pakistan?" He asks: "Do the writers of today have the same ecstasy, the same agony that the writers of the sub-continent in the pre- independence period had. Do their words have the same beauty of expression, the same sublime thought and clarity.
Does their life and personality has the same harmony, the same courage, truthfulness, the same love, the same compassion and the same optimism about the future?" - Extract from message published in Ehtesaab, Lahore No.1., 1979.