IN discussions on development in Pakistan, the dominant emphasis is on macroeconomic growth leading to the neglect of social change and of providing substantive freedoms to those caught in the trap of poverty. Rates of economic growth are undeniably important indicators but what has to be really examined is whether they meet the test of reality and are manifested in reducing deprivation and increasing the capabilities that lend value and meaning to the lives of around a third of the population barely managing to exist on the subsistence level.

Our indifference to distributional aspects of economic progress has to be overcome and the theme which speaks of equality of opportunity has to be perched on the front burner. The vital social dimension of enhancing human well-being by providing greater access to opportunities for dignified livelihoods is missing in our lopsided concentration on the conventional economic aspects of growth.

It is revealing that the concept of social opportunities, inextricably linked to implanting human feet on the first rung of the ladder of development, is given scant attention by our policy-makers. Social opportunities have been viewed by economic analysts as the preconditions for sustainable development which lift all boats.

Social opportunities, according to Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, “refer to the arrangements that society makes for education, health care and so on, which influence the individual’s substantive freedoms to live better... but also for more effective participation in economic and political activities.”

Successive governments in Pakistan, with the acquiescence of elected politicians, have looked away from the strategic sector of social opportunities and its crown jewel of universal primary education.

Universal suffrage is a vital element in launching democratization. Likewise, universal primary education, inclusive of the female population, is to be viewed as the first rung on the ladder of development. My assignment as ambassador to Japan brought about a profound change in my thinking and convinced me that the development of human resource in industrializing countries is to be accorded the highest priority. A brief look at Meiji Japan of the 1870s is warranted while keeping in mind the fact that Japan has virtually no natural resources. The ministry of education in Tokyo was established in 1871 and promulgated the fundamental code in 1872. The code preamble has an authentic ring of conviction in declaring that “education is the key to success and no man can afford to neglect it... There shall in the future be no community with an illiterate family or a family with an illiterate person.” The young leaders of modern Japan in the 1870s realized the supreme importance of universal elementary education in attaining their lofty goal of equality with the West which had imposed unequal treaties on it.

As the then education minister put it: “our country must move from the third to the second class and from the second class to first; and ultimately to the leading position among the countries of the world. The best way to do this is by laying the foundations of universal primary education.”

The goal of universal compulsory attendance in elementary schools was attained in thirty years of the establishment of the modern school system in 1871 and universal literacy achieved in another 20 years.

The linkage between basic education and faster development was indisputably established by the impressive economic performance of the East Asian countries until the slowdown in 1997. The high rates of economic growth in China, after its switch to the fast track of partial capitalism in 1980, were sustained by the spread of education across the country. Pre-reform China witnessed major educational advancement.

By 1982, its literacy had climbed to 96 per cent for males in the 15-19 age group and 85 per cent for females in the same age group, laying the groundwork, in the words of a perceptive observer, for ‘participatory economic expansion possible in a way it would not have been in India then — and is quite difficult in India even now.’

Why in Pakistan, faced with the incontrovertible evidence that educational achievement through universal literacy is the key to modernization and sustainable development, are we continuing to carry the debilitating load of illiteracy that is casting its long shadow over the lives of around 56 million of its citizens? Our understanding of the role of social and non-economic factors in development has serious gaps in it.

We have a strong inclination to ignore the lessons of economic history with the result that our sense of reality has gaps in it. We are deluding ourselves in thinking that we have a special immunity from the consequences of our choices. Unlike East Asia, we are not an education-conscious society. We have ignored the contemporary empirical finding of the impact of female education on reducing fertility rates. The gender gap is distressingly wide in the country: it consigns virtually half of the population to cramped lives and deprives the nation of their talents which remains underdeveloped.

Without institutionalized democracy and the rule of law, political opportunism stalks the land and diverts attention from nation-building issues of education, dissemination and poverty eradication. In an age of globalization, with knowledge-centred economies, we have to make up for our long neglect of learning by increased allocation of resources to education and by instituting accountability for ensuring that the nation gets a satisfactory return from the investment in education.

The obscurantist and feudal thinking in our society is alien to the realization that the eradication of illiteracy enhances human capabilities ad the quality of life. The elitist groups, influenced by the British legacy, concentrate on university education and express scepticism about the benefits of primary education. The negative view concerning primary education requires dispassionate examination.

Regarded from the perspective of grassroots development and keeping in mind the formative phase of individual growth, primary education is much vaster in its coverage than cloistered university learning and implants habits of mind in the impressionable years of children from the age of five to 12. By the time the secondary schooling is completed at the age of 16 and university education begins, it is more difficult to change attitudes and habits acquired in the earlier learning stage.

The schooling age provides the seeding times for inculcating values that retain relevance for a lifetime. Elementary education has a socializing effect on children through its egalitarian and unifying impact. The meaning of the word primary in The Oxford Dictionary is: ‘of the first importance, fundamental, basic.’ We have the primary, secondary and tertiary (university) stages in education and it is a distortion of priorities to neglect the many languishing in misery in rural areas where the vast majority of our population lives and mainly focus on the relatively well-heeled minority engaged in university education.

The creation of social opportunities providing access to basic education, health care and clean drinking water to all is a route to a progressive and prosperous Pakistan. The quality and equity issues relating to public education in Pakistan arise from widespread deterioration in public schools brought about by lack of motivated and trained teachers, the deficiencies in textbooks as well as in essential equipment, the lack of core curriculum and glaring disparities in schooling standards. Within the public schooling system, there are disparities between the well established schools in the main districts and low-quality teaching institutions springing from devolutionary exigencies in certain areas.

Fairness and justice are foundational societal values and should not be imperilled by providing unequal opportunities to children with different social backgrounds. Teacher absenteeism is a growing problem. It is not an exaggeration that on a single day more than half the teachers are not taking classes. Even while taking classes, quite a few of them are just physically present but are not engaged in teaching. A glaring malpractice is keeping teachers on the payrolls of schools and letting them draw monthly salaries without performing their assigned duties. The non-performing teachers act with impunity in an environment of political patronage.

Our public schooling system is largely dysfunctional and remedial action is rendered ineffectual by entrenched vested interests. It is clear that there is an urgent need for accountability with a view to ensuring that basic education of good quality is provided to the recipients and the political considerations are not allowed to muddy the learning stream.

In the new millennium, the greatest challenge facing countries, where more than 25 per cent of the population lives in extreme poverty on less than one dollar a day, is the eradication of poverty and the empowerment of the people through the dissemination of education which plants the seeds of self-improvement and of accepting responsibility for lifting themselves to a higher existence. We should draw inspiration from the following lines to provide the motivational fuel for the spread of education in the country:

‘Educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence. Rouse yourselves because we will need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we will need all your strength.’

The writer is a former ambassador. E-mail: karachi@sensei-international.com

THE population welfare department of the NWFP has chalked out plans to bring down the population growth rate in the province from 2.19 per cent to 1.84 per cent in the next three years. This move has apparently come as a result of pressure from foreign donors who have impressed on Islamabad that without controlling the population growth rate, Pakistan cannot make any progress.

This is a truism any thinking person should know. Some obvious facts can be stated here. With 3.14 million children being added to the country’s population every year, Pakistan would have to generate an additional GNP of $1.55 billion just to keep the GNP per capita at the current level of $492.

In the NWFP the literacy rate is a measly 35.4 per cent. In 1998 it had three million children of four years and below. In three years the figure had gone up to 3.2 million. To educate the extra numbers and the backlog of out of school children, at least 19,000 more primary schools are required. It may be pointed out that on an average only a 1,000 plus new primary schools are opened all over the country every year.

At this rate, whatever economic progress is made is neutralized by the high population growth rate. It leaves us running fast and yet remaining in the same place — to use the analogy in Alice in Wonderland.

It is, therefore, a positive development that the MMA government in Peshawar has finally woken up to the dire implications of the population explosion for the province. This is to be welcomed since it means that the clergy in that province, where its hold is strong, has come round to accepting the importance of small families and the need to reduce the fertility rate. The vital element, however, is the strategy adopted.

From what we are told about the plan, it seems that a holistic approach is not on the cards. The thrust is towards inducting more doctors (from 3,310 to 3,460), enhancing the health centres from 14,000 to 17,000, health outlets from 1,200 to 1,280, homeopaths from 2,210 to 2,260 and mobile units from 19 to 30.

One can gather from the published report that the government is trapped in the same pitfalls as has been the case with so many population plans adopted by previous administrations in Pakistan. It is erroneously believed that by making contraceptives easily available through medical practitioners it is possible to lower the population growth rate. But is this always the case?

First of all making contraceptives easily accessible may help in increasing the contraceptive prevalence to a small extent only. The old saying of taking the horse to the trough but not being able to make it drink holds true in this case. Physicians may be good motivators but can they overcome the resistance which the population programme faces from the wider social environment? It has now been proved beyond doubt that religious beliefs hardly come in the way of acceptance of birth control since most people who have taken part in surveys have not cited ideological beliefs as the answer to the question why they did not restrict the number of their children.

This should explode the myth perpetuated by many that Islam has been a factor in the failure of the population programme in Pakistan. Gavin W. Jones and Dr Mehtab Karim in their book Islam, the State and Population also confirm this when they write, “Clearly, contrary to the views of some earlier commentators, Islam itself is no barrier to low levels of fertility.” They write, “While Islam does encourage all Muslims to marry, it does not forbid the use of contraception... Some Muslim populations have reached replacement level fertility.”

The unrecognized fact is that the major obstacle in the way of the population programme in Pakistan has been the low status of women in society. When women are perceived as second class citizens who do not enjoy the esteem, recognition, and opportunities as men have, why should a majority of parents be satisfied with a girl child?

The woman’s status has come to be hinged to the gender of the child she bears. If she has a son it bestows on her a position of honour. But woe betide a mother who bears daughters and fails to have a son. Similarly, the education of women has a positive impact on the fertility rate as does their gainful employment. Women who are highly educated and are working tend to have fewer children.

The NWFP population plan appears to be ignoring these factors. A society, which perceives its women as chattel in the possession of men, would hardly care to educate them or let them work and attain economic independence. The image the NWFP has projected of itself in terms of its approach to women has not been one which would inspire much hope for women and the population planning programme.

In a society where a large number of girls are not sent to school, where there are pockets where women are not allowed to go and vote and where a large number of women are not allowed to go out and work because Islam supposedly prohibits it, can one expect the fertility rate to come down?

Hence the idea of setting up contraceptive services outlet, which is a good one, may not produce the optimum results. It is important to adopt a holistic approach, especially in terms of the treatment of women. It is time the MMA recognized the status accorded to women in Islam. The distorted view generally presented by the clergy is actually designed to perpetuate the control of the vested interests in a patriarchal society.

A woman burdened with multiple pregnancies and a large number of children to rear can hardly be expected to show any independence in her approach to life. She is not in a position to struggle for her emancipation. This suits the men who derive advantages from keeping women in a state of suppression.

Until the religious parties which are members of the MMA radically change their views towards women, the population programme cannot be a success in the NWFP or elsewhere.

AS I write, I have before me an Islamabad newspaper with the photograph of a woman whose face has been badly disfigured by acid thrown at her by someone either out of jealousy or hatred or because of unrequited love.

None of her features are intact and nobody can know what she looked like previously. The photograph merely shows a blob of kneaded flesh, with just the eyes showing. It’s a wonder how they escaped.

Whenever I see a picture of this kind I start imagining how I would feel in a similar situation, being the victim of a heartless act which seems to blight the future and make one despair of enjoying the felicities of life — particularly if one is young, as all such sufferers are. Honestly one would rather have died than go through this torture. Of course, with modern plastic surgery amends can be made, but how many of the victims can afford that? Or if the government is sympathetic, for how many women will it take the trouble and bear the expense? Somehow most of them are from the lower middle class.

I am a great believer in retributive justice, especially in heinous crimes, but there is yet to be a government in this world that subscribes to it. In cases of acid-throwing, what legal punishment will teach the perpetrator a lesson, and what satisfaction will it give to his or her victim? But I honestly believe that, however gruesome it may sound in these liberal times, the application of acid on the guilty man’s face under medical supervision is the only way out, if the intention also is to put a stop to this kind of crime.

We are ever ready to criticize the government for its failings, but sometimes the latter does take measures expected from a modern democracy with a feeling for various suffering groups. But the trouble is that it does not sufficiently publicize these measures, when their very utility depends on public awareness about them. It seems that the information ministry and its allied departments are there only to improve the image of government leaders and make them appear larger than they are by highlighting the qualities that they do not possess.

There is the case of the excellent Juvenile Justice System Act which lays down an entirely new procedure for young delinquents and wayward youth, and is a truly revolutionary measure. You’ll be surprised to know that most magistrates who have to administer it, and the police and jail officials who have to act on it, are unfamiliar with it. I say it again that the federal and provincial information set-ups are so engrossed with publicizing the imaginary attributes of the respective government leaders that they have never, repeat, never, given the Act a thought. Nor has any effort been made, except by an NGO (God bless them!) to conduct refresher courses on it for the magistracy, the police and the prison staff.

Another example is the 2002 legislation that added a new section (Section 174-A) to the Criminal Procedure Code of Pakistan. This provides for an effective mechanism to prosecute persons accused of burning women (also men) by fire, acid, etc. or throwing the blame on a faulty cooking stove in case of housewives, and makes it mandatory for the police to immediately register an FIR and report the matter to the nearest magistrate. It also makes it compulsory for doctors to record the statement of the burn victim, so that it can later be used as an evidence in the police case and in the court.

Very little is known about the new law by the educated people concerned, and least by the ordinary men and women from among whom mostly come the burn and acid-throwing cases, and even I heard of it for the first time through the “Manual of Operationalizing Section 174-A” that a friend gave me, and I at once sat down to write about it, so moved I was by the plight of burnt women. Who do you think has published this manual? Since you must be sure that it couldn’t be the government which would take the trouble to follow up a really historic act, I won’t keep you guessing. It is again an NGO based in Lahore, the Family Planning Association of Pakistan of Dr. Atiya Inayatullah.

When the FPAP took up this noble task, a survey conducted by it revealed that this beneficial legislation was practically unknown even to the law enforcement agencies. So it compiled this comprehensive manual under its project for strengthening institutions that are combating domestic violence against women in burn cases. Apart from explaining the salient features of the new law, it details the statutory duties of various public functionaries and tells them about the procedures they must adopt for timely collection and preservation of vital evidence. Presently the FPAP’s programme is being implemented in the districts of Islamabad and Rawalpindi with generous assistance from the European Union, the latest do-gooder and donor from the West.

The FPAP has also sought the help of the information ministry (which should actually have initiated the publicity in the first place) so that it may launch a mass awareness campaign through radio, television and the press. A more important step was to address the District Nazim of Rawalpindi and all the tehsil nazims, as well as the Islamabad Capital Territory, to avail themselves of the capacity building workshops it was offering for councillors, police officers, doctors and representatives of NGOs during April and May.

The Family Planning Association of Pakistan realizes that this is a very humble beginning, particularly when seen in the context of the country-wide evil that burning and acid-throwing is. In fact the enthusiasm and dedication of those conducting the programme left me a little perplexed, specially when they expressed optimism about involving other organizations in the provinces in their work. I thought the mass awareness campaign alone was the most difficult part of the whole undertaking because without it Section 174-A cannot achieve its desired aim.

Anyway, this is not the first time that determined pioneers have hoped to achieve results which, on the face of it, appeared unattainable. This is such a terrible phenomenon, this tendency to cause incalculable harm to women through burning and acid-throwing, that one can only wish the best of luck to those engaged in this noble task.

WHEN an uprising of sorts compelled President Lucio Gutierrez to tender his resignation and seek asylum two weeks ago, he was following (rather than setting) a precedent. His successor, Alfredo Palacio, is Ecuador’s eighth president in nine years, and Gutierrez was the third head of state in that period to have his tenure curtailed by a popular revolt.

Ironically, Gutierrez was intimately involved in the previous instance of such an overthrow. Five years ago, as a colonel, he led middle-ranking army officers into a coalition with radical civilian organizations that toppled the unpopular Jamil Mahuad. Although that attempt at a political makeover foundered because the military high command reneged on a deal it had struck with the rebels, less than three years later Gutierrez, by then cashiered, comfortably won a presidential election — largely on the basis of his role in the events of 2000.

Three years before that, a two-day strike and protests by an estimated two million Ecuadorians had brought down the regime of President Abdala Bucaram. The sense that toppling presidents is something of a pastime in this equatorial nation (which happens to be the world’s largest banana exporter) is reinforced by the knowledge that not one of the 22 heads of state between 1925 and 1948 completed a term in office. However, there have been exceptions, not least in the period that immediately followed the end of military rule in 1979.

To the despair of most Ecuadorians, that period coincided with crucial changes in the global economic and political environment. What probably wasn’t a coincidence was the fact that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) became considerably more aggressive in pressing its ideologically-motivated prescriptions on client states following the ascent to power of free-market zealots in the United States and Britain.

Although deeper historical factors have, obviously, also been at work, some analysts trace the present phase of Ecuadorian instability back to 1983, when the IMF persuaded the government in Quito to take over the loans from foreign banks on which members of the nation’s elite had defaulted. This injunction pushed Ecuador further into debt, as it borrowed $1.5 billion to pay off the private debts. Don’t worry, said the IMF, we’ll teach you how to recoup your losses: to start with, why not raise the price of electricity and other necessities?

The government followed this advice at the cost of alienating the public, then realized it wouldn’t be enough. There, there, said the IMF, no need to fret; what you’ve got to do next is to slash some public sector jobs — let’s say about 120,000 of them. And by the way, don’t forget you’ve also got to liberalize your financial market.

The latter measure, whereby banks were “liberated” from government controls, led, not surprisingly, to sharp increases in private debt and interest rates. By then Ecuador was well on its way to being “structurally adjusted”. In recent years the terminology has changed — structural adjustment programmes, the IMF’s favourite euphemism of the 1980s, have given way to poverty reduction strategies. The nature of the affliction, however, remains much the same.

In 2003, when the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), which had played a crucial role in the rebellion against Jamil Mahuad by mobilizing the urban poor, decided to disentangle itself from the Gutierrez regime, it cited, among other things, the fact that the government had “maintained a position contrary to the national interest by signing a Letter of Intent with the IMF in which [Gutierrez] pledged “to privatize the petroleum sector, electricity, telecommunications, and national resources like water” and “to liberalize labour markets through methods that destroy all the guarantees and rights won by the workers”.

The upsurge against Mahuad was occasioned chiefly by that president’s devotion to the IMF and the United States: after all the privatization, “austerity measures”, “downsizing” and “labour-market deregulation” (which is a euphemism for stripping workers of the few privileges they may have, much as minimum wages and the right to organize), the dollarization of the economy was considered a step too far by most Ecuadorians. Yet it proceeded anyway after Mahuad’s overthrow, once the rebel leaders had been outwitted by the mainstream military. It has plausibly been suggested that the generals were acting on instructions received from the Clinton administration.

The IMF did not, of course, pick Ecuador for the bestowal of special favours: most of it’s Third World patients are generally prescribed the same bitter medicine (although a few of the ingredients, as well as the strength of the dosage can vary from one country to another). As countries throughout Africa and Latin America and in parts of Asia and even Europe have discovered to their despair, the medicine doesn’t work. But that is in fact a misperception. In most cases the prescriptions serve their purpose admirably. The problem is that they are sold to the patients under false pretences — and sometimes virtually at gunpoint.

Open your economy, says the IMF, privatize everything (the air we breathe has not yet been targeted, but for how long will it remain a free commodity), smash trade unions and prosperity will follow. It does, but only for some: the elite’s prospects invariably improve, as does the scope for corruption; those highly valued “foreign investors” and speculators are promised a field day, as long as “stability” can be maintained. Avenues of employment open up for a (usually small) minority.

But what about those who lose their jobs, or half their wages (and the right to strike)? Those who suffer because “deregulation” sends the prices of essential services and commodities racing upwards? Those who lose access to education or medical care because their government is under instructions not to “waste” any of its precious resources on such “unproductive” services?

No, prosperity does not “trickle down” to any appreciable extent. With rare exceptions, those who have known nothing but austerity are condemned to stick with it for the rest of their days. Small wonder, then, that people in most parts of the Third World have wised up to what they perceive as the IMF’s hidden agenda.

If it’s not that, then it must simply be callous disregard for the increased hardship and the perpetuation of poverty that propels policies whereby “healthy” or “spectacular” levels of “growth” are accompanied by a widening gap between rich and poor. After all, it couldn’t be a coincidence that the redistribution of wealth is an alien concept for the IMF. The stress is on the “creation” of wealth, with no regard for those at whose expense, or on the basis of whose toil, it is being created.

But all of this is hardly a classified secret. Then, the question arises, why do governments fall prey to the IMF’s wiles? Loan addiction is a part of the answer, although the same phenomenon could also be described as a vicious circle: indebtedness increases the attraction of borrowing more to pay off the interest on what was borrowed before. Ecuador’s new president Alfredo Palacio, for instance, has pointed out that it is “immoral that Ecuador spends about 40 per cent of its budget to service its $16.6 billion debt to international banks”.

Palacio doesn’t intend to default on the repayment, but says his government needs to “improve the distribution of budget funds and restructure the servicing of foreign debt to boost social development”; he describes as “a big mistake” the fact that 80 per cent of his compatriots live below the poverty line.

Although Palacio was vice-president under Gutierrez, there was no love lost between the two of them. Whether he has the inclination or the institutional support to initiate the social revolution his nation so desperately needs is an open question.

The unrest that brought down Gutierrez wasn’t directly related to the fact that he kowtowed to international finance or described himself as the “best ally of the US” and allowed Washington to use its military base in Ecuador for its now all-but-forgotten intervention in Colombia. It had more to do with corruption and related shenanigans, such as the president’s dismissal of the entire Supreme Court last December, when he replaced the judges with his own supporters. The latter were sacked last month — in a too-little, too-late attempt to placate the public — but not before they had cleared several politicians, including ex-president Bucaram, of corruption charges.

Bucaram lost no time in ending his exile in Panama, and shortly afterwards declared in a public speech that, if returned to power, he would emulate the policies of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Interestingly, Gutierrez too had posed as a Chavez wannabe in the 2002 electoral campaign, although he performed a quick right turn upon gaining the presidency. This clearly suggests that Chavez — who has seriously been striving to improve conditions for the poorest Venezuelans in the face of profound middle-class and US hostility, including at least two attempts to topple him — amounts to something of an ideal in the Ecuadorian popular imagination.

Which isn’t, in the circumstances, particularly surprising — and in all likelihood the phenomenon extends throughout a continent that has suffered more than most under the combined aegis of the IMF, domestic elite and military juntas. It’s far from clear whether the ouster of Gutierrez will rescue Ecuador from the brink. But the toppling of presidents who renege on promises and abuse their power is an idea that deserves to catch on. And not just in Latin America.

E-mail: mahirali1@gmail.com