THE principal areas that were hit by the earthquake two months ago belong to one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world and among the least developed and more poverty-stricken regions of Pakistan.
The severity of the 7.6 Richter scale earthquake has multiplied many fold the enormous difficulties that the unfortunate inhabitants of the area already faced.
Already meteorologists are predicting a harsh winter and relief workers are warning against a second wave of casualties, comparable to that brought by the deadly earthquake itself. Unfortunately, this time around, there will be much fewer aid workers and supplies to mitigate the troubles of those trapped in the far off mountainous areas, notwithstanding the much better preparedness of the government, the NGOs and the foreign aid agencies, compared to the tardy response earlier.
It seems that the race against winter is nearly lost through the complacency of the administration, which was keen on “proving the cynics wrong”. Although the supply of tents has increased, it turns out that most of the tents were inadequate to prevent against the snow, rain and severe cold people in the affected areas are experiencing.
While no one can prepare adequately or perfectly for a natural disaster, it is possible to mitigate its ravages and to be ready against the next round of losses that may come in its wake. A most serious and imminent danger lurking in the aftermath of the earthquake is the threat to the future livelihood of those affected by it for which adequate preparations have not yet been made.
The government has not yet prepared a comprehensive plan for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the affected areas and presented it to the public or parliament for discussion. What it has, is a wish list of things that it would like others to do. The funds mobilised through the generosity of external and domestic donors have been based on the hurriedly arrived estimates of losses inflicted by the earthquake and the cost of replacement of the assets and the income-earning opportunities lost. An implicit assumption of the exercise is that things should return to their prior position after reconstruction, except for a minor allowance to make new housing and construction more earth-quake resistant.
What remains unexplored – and needs to be urgently thought through and implemented — is how to ensure that those living in the earthquake-affected areas (as well as other ecologically fragile areas, such as in Balochistan and Sindh) are enabled a livelihood which is less vulnerable to natural disasters. There must be a synergy between the reconstruction plans of the area and the patterns of livelihood of the people of that area, there needs and support systems that have existed in the past and need to be improved to reduce their vulnerabilities, which have been unravelled by the disaster.
While the negative impact of the earthquake on the national economy has been estimated by the ADB-World Bank team at less than three-quarters of a percent of GDP, the earthquake’s effect on NWFP and Azad Kashmir are proportionately much larger. Over a quarter of Azad Kashmir’s GDP and about 4% of NWFP’s GDP are estimated to have been lost due to the earthquake. In terms of the local economies affected by the earthquake, the percentages are much larger. Thus more than half of the economic output of Azad Kashmir’s earthquake affected areas and more than a quarter of output of those of NWFP’s affected areas have been lost due to the disaster. These are very substantial losses and can’t be easily recovered except through the restoration of the economies and the generation of new employment opportunities.
Apart from the losses of income, there have been much more substantial losses in terms of human and physical capital of that area, which can’t be easily and accurately estimated, nor can they be made up in the short or medium term. The immediate task of the planners, apart from re-building essential physical and social infrastructures, such as roads, bridges, schools and hospitals, must be to provide those living in the area with adequate livelihood and employment to rebuild their lives and assets with their own and their community’s efforts. In view of the harsh winter and the disruption caused in their lives, this may not be possible to undertake immediately, but economic life seldom comes to a standstill even in the worst of circumstances.
A prolonged period in which employment opportunities are lacking and survival is based on doles, can create a vicious circle of dependency and destitution, which could become a social menace and prove counterproductive to the reconstruction efforts.
In order to remedy this situation and provide a firm basis for an early regeneration of lost livelihoods in the earthquake zone, an option which Pakistan’s planners have been reluctant to try, largely due to its resistance by politicians as well as the donor community, though for different reasons, is to have an employment guarantee or work for cash programme, seems eminently suitable in the present circumstances.
There is a large amount of labour-intensive work in the earthquake devastated areas which needs to be undertaken, including rubble clearance, ground levelling, camps maintenance, sanitation, road construction, terracing repairs, as well as house building, which can be undertaken by offering employment opportunities for extended periods. It would not be as if these programmes will simply be used to dig holes for filling them.
In contrast to other anti-poverty interventions whose benefits often accrue largely to the non-poor, employment assurance programmes have the advantage of being self-targeting since they usually involve hard physical labour. In the present case, the rationale for such a programme lies in creating infrastructural assets not only because of the earthquake but also to offset the endemic disadvantage of the areas’ backwardness and poverty.
In the past, employment-centred public works programs in Pakistan have not been successful because of their capture by patronage politics. With a greater participation of the people and the NGOs in the reconstruction plan, it should be possible to avoid such leakages. The usual provision of keeping the wages below the minimum wage to prevent the non-poor and non-residents to take advantage of the scheme, may not be necessary in the present case and the remuneration may be linked to the household needs.
The availability of sufficient budgetary resources for the reconstruction programme, augmented if necessary, from the Khushal Pakistan and other programmes run by the legislators, should be able to provide sufficient opportunities to employ the people who have lost their livelihoods during the earthquake. The ILO has reportedly run some pilot projects in the affected areas paying cash for work. Its experience would be valuable in replicating the programme on a larger scale as soon as conditions permit.
Besides cash and/or food work programmes, there is a need for crating more livelihood creation opportunities in the affected areas, if they are to be made economically viable and resilient. Largely due to security concerns, especially in Azad Kashmir, no attempt was made to diversify the predominantly agricultural economies of these areas. As a result, manufacturing and other non-agricultural commodity producing sectors account for less than five per cent of total employment and output. This lack of non-agricultural employment opportunities in the area has also been responsible for the high out migration of adult males from these areas.
More than two-thirds of the households in Azad Kashmir and half of those in the NWFP-affected areas receive remittances (a rough indicator of the proportion of households with migrants). The proportion of such households is higher in Azad Kashmir, which also has a higher proportion of poorer among those receiving remittances from abroad. While remittances have helped to some extent to alleviate poverty in these areas, the migrants themselves could play an important role in raising the livelihood opportunities in these areas by inducing them to invest in their former homes.
Two other sources which could help the improvement of livelihood and employment in these areas are housing construction and microfinance. In the case of housing as well as other areas of reconstruction, as pointed out by many other experts, a bottom-up, rather than the top-down approach being adopted by the authorities, is the need of the hour.
The government needs only to provide finance, expertise and necessary material for building their own housing, according to their own needs and local conditions. Any attempt to impose inappropriate technology, such as prefabricated modules, will be ill-advised and will lose the opportunity for creating local jobs and skill creation that could result from allowing the affected persons to build their own houses with the help of their communities.
In regard to microfinance, a major area is to rebuild and help in the prevention of further attrition of the livestock herds. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, despite considerable loss of livestock, households are being forced to enter into distress sales of their surviving livestock. To help prevent this situation, microfinance institutions should not only give loans for buying livestock, but also give consumption loans against livestock as collateral.
THE principal areas that were hit by the earthquake two months ago belong to one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world and among the least developed and more poverty-stricken regions of Pakistan.
