ISLAMABAD, Oct 19: The Oct 8 earthquake not only killed and maimed tens of thousands but it deprived millions of people of their livelihoods, putting a huge burden on a country already blighted by poverty.

The government plans to create jobs by employing quake survivors in reconstruction activities, but experts warn it will be a long time before the Himalayan region has anything approaching stable employment.

The International Labour Organization estimated that more than a million people lost their jobs due to the earthquake and that nearly all of them supported at least two dependents each.

The earthquake struck in one of the poorest regions of Pakistan that lived off an already scarce amount of farmland, which was torn apart and washed away in the disaster that claimed more than 45,000 lives.

“The devastation is massive and it has hit a vast and already impoverished region where most of the labourers worked in the informal sector,” said Karamat Ali, executive director of the private Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has set up a plan for the ‘early rehabilitation’ of earthquake victims.

“The prime minister has directed the government agencies to employ local people in reconstruction activities and also train them as thousands of masons, woodworkers, supervisors and labourers are needed,” an official said.

But the Sungi Development Foundation (SDF), a non-government organization that works with mountain communities, said unemployment would be a long-term problem as the disaster had destroyed the entire economic base.

“The loss of livelihood and agriculture is manifold and multi-dimensional and would continue for a long time,” said Manzoor Ahmed Awan, a disaster management expert at the SDF.

“Thousands of families’ breadwinners have died or been injured or disabled in the earthquake and because just one or two people usually fend for the entire family, the loss of livelihood is enormous,” Mr Awan said.

Much of the working population in Kashmir and NWFP had already headed before the earthquake to other parts of Pakistan to take menial jobs.

“Due to the small landholdings and lack of industry in the area about 40 per cent of men worked in other cities on a daily-wage basis,” Mr Awan said.

“But they are also out of work because they rushed to their villages to rescue their relatives,” he said.

“In this bleak scenario the only silver lining is the reconstruction activity when it starts in an organized manner, because it would generate employment for the local population.”

However, he said, Pakistan must ensure that people desperate for work did not neglect rebuilding their own homes.

“People must be paid a wage for building their own homes. If they are working to sustain themselves, they will not be able to reconstruct their own shelters,” Mr Awan said.

The International Labour Organization said that the hardest hit areas were among the poorest in Pakistan, with millions of people living on less than two dollars a day even before the disaster.

The UN labour agency said that an initial assessment in the wake of the 7.6 magnitude earthquake showed it had destroyed most infrastructure and shops in towns. The quake also caused heavy loss of livestock and farmland, the economic mainstay in rural areas.—AFP