| 21 November 2004 | Sunday | 08 Shawwal 1425 |
Rights of the child
In his first address to the nation as prime minister, Mr Shaukat Aziz on Friday touched upon a range of national issues, although much of what he said was of a generalized nature and did not indicate any new policy direction. He talked of the exercise of economic sovereignty, political stability, security concerns, employment, and the development of trade skills in a growing economy. He mentioned plans to step up the pace of economic and social progress and to improve the government's capacity to deliver.
The prime minister also gave a dramatic twist to the announcement that his government had not availed of the last two tranches of $250 million each to which it was eligible under the three-year $1.5 billion IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). The PRGF agreement, signed on December 7, 2001, is due to expire early next month. With strong economic fundamentals, Pakistan does not need IMF credit to tide over its balance of payments difficulties. The "no" to IMF credit follows last year's pre-payment of expensive debt of over $1 billion to the World Bank.
The dependence on multilateral donors is being reduced in favour of access to the international financial markets. A $-500 million euro bond was successfully launched recently, and another Sharia-compliant official paper is expected to be floated soon. But withdrawing from the PRGF crutches is apparently aimed more at giving a message to the global markets that the time has come for foreign banks, fund managers and investors to have a fresh look at Pakistan's economy, more so when first-generation reforms have been completed.
Clearly, Islamabad will remain engaged with the IMF both for advice and technical assistance for the second generation of reforms and for speeding up economic growth. Borrowings from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, which work closely with the IMF, will continue. Pakistan would not be bound by IMF conditionalities and can undertake reforms at its own pace, sequence and timing and thus regain economic sovereignty. For the IMF, the country's economic performance has been a success story which has enabled the authorities in Islamabad to win waivers for deviations from the fund's conditionalities.
The IMF programmes were primarily aimed at achieving macro-economic stability, but tended to retard pro-poor economic growth at a heavy social cost. With greater freedom to work out home-grown solutions to major national problems, one will expect policy makers to focus now on key issues like unemployment, inflation, human resource development and labour-intensive small and medium-sized industries. So far, much of what we hear in these areas is rhetoric. The prime minister has announced some steps in this direction, but these need to be pursued vigorously.
The government has plans to train 300,000 educated youth annually in various skills needed at home and abroad. Effectively implemented, this scheme should do away gradually with the mismatch between the graduates produced by educational institutions and the skills required by a growing economy. Unemployment caused on this count may be reduced. Another good move is to make education free up to Class X, though this is restricted to a few federal-run schools. About 800,000 people will be educated under an adult literacy programme.
The SMEs are a major area of economic activity under-served by commercial banks and financial institutions. Many of these are in the informal sector, and the banks finance only about seven per cent of their total capital requirements. The bankers are risk-averse despite the fact that lending to SMEs yields lucrative returns and their debt servicing record is much better than that of the large-scale industries.
SMEs would receive a boost from the official decision to give credit guarantees to the tune of Rs6 billion. Apart from the SMEs, employment will also be provided by filling in vacancies in government departments, specially in the education and health sectors. Under the revived 'Khushal Programme', small development schemes will be launched to create employment through development of essential infrastructure.
Those who were looking for substantial proposals that could make an immediate difference to the lives of the ordinary people must have been disappointed by the prime minister's speech. The official argument has been that the fundamentals must first be set right before attention can be shifted to the micro level. But it has been five years since Mr Aziz became associated with economic planning, and the argument is beginning to sound a little stale. Planning has to begin now from the bottom upward rather than be undertaken according to perceptions from the top. It is about time we heard of some actual policy outcomes.
Rights of the child
Another Universal Children's Day has come and gone. But despite the lofty sentiments of the president and prime minister, who reaffirmed their commitment to the welfare of the most vulnerable section of society, we had nothing to show for the pledge we made to ourselves and the international community in 1990. That was the year when Pakistan ratified - with reservations that were later withdrawn - the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
From this basic document, Pakistan went on to sign other international agreements, dealing directly or indirectly with the state of its children, and took steps to institute national laws - the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance and Compulsory Primary Education Act for provinces among them.
While these have been welcome measures, what has been conspicuous by its absence is the implementation of the legal provisions. There has been no visible improvement in the lot of the children, and periodic reports by the state and independent organizations testify to this. Children remain at the receiving end of the stick in a number of areas.
They are forced to forego their rights to a decent education, and contribute instead to the family income through manual labour, much of it involving dangerous, backbreaking activity. Indeed, the number of child labourers in the country is thought to far exceed the official figures of 3.6 million - it is believed to be closer to nine million. While primary school enrolment has increased, the drop out rate has shown no signs of abating and has in fact risen
from 40 per cent in 1996-1997 to 54 per cent in 1999-2000.
One of the factors responsible for this is the corporal punishment meted out to schoolchildren. This is specially true of the madressahs where children are often brutally beaten. While these may be among the better known issues of child exploitation, what is, for cultural sensitivities, rarely focused upon is child trafficking, prostitution and sexual abuse.
Change cannot be expected overnight - the issue of child exploitation is too closely tied to poverty for it to be resolved without taking the larger national perspective into account. However, demonstration of some political will on the part of the government could go a long way in mobilizing public opinion about the rights of the child. For what is the good of signing international treaties and enacting laws if attitudes are not transformed and legislation not implemented? A more committed response to the problem would not be out of place at this juncture.