RECENTLY, the All Pakistan Alliance for Katchi Abadis, the Awami Workers Party and hundreds of residents successfully staved off a CDA-led attempt to demolish a low-income settlement in Sector I-11, Islamabad. This confrontation was the latest in a series of protests carried out to protect the residential rights of mostly informal low-income workers residing in and around the capital city.

The coverage around this particular movement, as in the case of any involving economic and social rights, remains restricted to the news format. That means there’s a focus on the specific actors involved, the problem in its most obvious manifestation, and the various immediate outcomes that emerge from a confrontation with state authorities. Rarely, if at all, is any effort made to locate such events within the broader policy imperatives of residential security or meaningful employment.

This lack of analytical attention is reflective of a conversational consensus amongst the political elite, economic analysts and managers in multilateral institutions, which marginalises issues of social services, and accords overwhelming attention to macroeconomic stabilisation, mega projects, and fiscal health.

A few days before these events in Islamabad, a high-ranking IMF representative gave a presentation on the progress made by Pakistan as part of the Fund’s latest stabilisation programme. Much of the discussion on the current government was cautiously coated with optimism, and the words used for the finance minister, particularly, were fairly laudatory — something along the lines of ‘he’s more Catholic than the pope’, an analogy where Catholicism implied commitment to stabilisation/structural adjustment measures and the pope being the IMF.

There are, however, many valid reasons why this slant needs to be rectified, assuming that the state is serious about improving the lives of the millions living in informal settlements and working under informal arrangements.

Asset inequalities remain one of the biggest contributing factors in the persistence of poverty.

For starters, the relationship between secure access to housing and long-term socio-economic uplift is well documented. Only recently, The Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates’ remarkable account of how systemic, long-term targeting of African-American families in the shape of spatial marginalisation and forced evacuations off land has resulted in significant differences in income and wealth attainment compared to non-black households in the US.

Far closer to home, several studies on Punjab have empirically demonstrated how asset inequalities, measured most accurately by access to residential and agricultural land, remain one of the biggest contributing factors in the inter-generational persistence of poverty.

Simply put, low-income families that had access to secure dwellings a century ago are more likely to have moved out of impoverished conditions within the space of at most two generations, compared to those who were locked out of accessing residential, let alone agricultural, land. It is no surprise then that poverty in Pakistan continues to be highest amongst individuals belonging to non-land-controlling lower and scheduled caste groups.

When highlighting the state’s indifference, and making the case for enhancing residential security for the working class, three statistics make for particularly jarring reading — firstly, in case it wasn’t clear already, Pakistan is still a poor country, where nearly 40pc of the entire population subsists on less than two dollars a day.

Secondly, depending on the statistics one uses, the urban population is growing between 3.5 to 4.6pc per annum, meaning that very soon the majority of impoverished households will reside in big cities, as opposed to some rural hinterland that exists in the peripheries of our collective imagination.

Thirdly, the country faces a housing shortage of nearly 7.6 million units, with the gap increasing by a minimum of 500,000 every year; 85pc of this demand gap exists for households making less than Rs20,000 a month.

Such significant economic compulsions, coupled with skewed priorities and an entrenched system of predatory political brokerage, lead to the rise of what are often demarcated as informal settlements. These residential arrangements, which are often razed to make way for bigger roads — as in the case of the new Circular Road Project in Lahore — are nothing more than the manifestation of quiet urban resilience in the face of callous indifference.

What is even more grating is that the state actively contributes to the socio-economic mobility and consolidation of a vast majority of the middle and upper-middle class in this country, a fact that many holding relative and absolute privilege will never admit. Going by accounts of affluent professionals or entrepreneurs it appears everyone got where they are now through sheer hard work, and by waging a valiant jihad against a corrupt system.

This ‘self-made’ fable, popular particularly in urban Punjab, ignores how the state has historically subsidised the lives of at least two generations of the middle class, through state employment in the bureaucracy or the military, which guarantee pensions and stable incomes; by distributing vast amounts of residential and agricultural land as retirement benefits; and by actively encouraging — through zoning, service provisions, and road construction — a real-estate market dealing almost exclusively in suburban fantasies.

The state, it seems, has already determined what is worthy of its immediate attention, and what should be consigned to the quotidian hell of bureaucratic management. Worryingly enough, almost everyone else seems to fall in line behind this categorisation. Macroeconomic stabilisation is now the sole yardstick being used to determine whether the incumbent government is doing a good job, while everything else — such as redistribution and delivering actual services to the poor — appears to have completely fallen off the radar.

The writer is a freelance columnist.

Email: umairjaved87@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2014