ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has said the government was committed to alleviating poverty as progress and prosperity of Pakistan was linked with uplift of poor and downtrodden segments of society.

“It is my belief that a country where there is an ocean of poor people and a few rich cannot make progress,” he said while speaking at the launch of Ehsaas District Development Portal Data4Pakistan here on Tuesday.

The prime minister said a civilised society cared for its poor, it was identified by not how the rich spend their lives but how the poor were living.

He said this portal would help the government in spending development funds with justice and according to needs of the people.

He said unfortunately the powerful people in the government spent all the development funds in their constituencies thus widening the gap between the rich and poor.

Ehsaas District Development Portal Data4Pakistan launched

Lamenting the policies and practice of the previous governments, the prime minister said ground realities were not considered in the budget allocations at that time and more than half of Punjab’s budget was being spent on uplift of Lahore alone resultantly the metropolis became developed but other cities of that province were ignored.

Mr Khan also referred to Isakhel tehsil of Mianwali district and Dera Ghazi Khan district of Punjab, which were backward in health, education and infrastructure, but were ignored by the past governments. He said his government would focus on equal development of all the areas.

He said this portal would help identify the areas which were in most need of funds, besides finding other vital statistics about issues being faced by the local people.

The prime minister said this was the first step in finding necessary ways and means to fight poverty. He said Data4Pakistan would also help in policy making at the higher level as well as allocation of budget.

He said the earmarking of the budget would be on the basis of need and merit without any political or other influences.

Earlier, Special Assistant to the PM on Poverty Alleviation and Social Protection Dr Sania Nishtar said Data4Pakistan, the first initiative of its kind in the country, provided open and public access to a spatial interactive portal that had poverty estimates for every district in Pakistan, along with over 120 development and policy indicators. She said the portal currently had six rounds of district poverty and development data, covering the period 2004-2018.

This portal would be a very valuable resource for federal, provincial and district level policymakers, for decision making, she said. She said as part of Ehsaas strategy, the Data4Pakistan Portal had been developed in collaboration with the World Bank.

Dr Nishtar said interactive maps allowed the user to visualise and compare districts on poverty and two additional indicators.

She said the innovative portal used data produced by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, as part of its Social and Living Standards Measurement Surveys as well as the multiple indicators cluster surveys produced by the provincial bureaus of statistics.

Dr Nishtar said the indicators currently available in the portal, included a range of demographic, health, education and employment statistics as well as access to key services like water, sanitation, electricity and gas. It also provides a number of gender parity indices at the district level.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2020