KARACHI: Being a signatory to International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions, Pakistan is supposed to provide social security to its citizens by providing them unemployment benefits as well as old-age and disability support. The manifestos of major political parties have failed to acknowledge it as a fundamental right.

 Though the PPP, the PML-N and the PTI have outlined certain plans, they mostly target the vulnerable sections of society; not the citizenry at large. Mian Raza Rabbani, a member of the 18th Amendment Constitutional Committee, said he had not much to say about social security.

Karamat Ali, of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Administration and Research (PILAR), believed that all unemployed should be registered and people should contribute to specific institutions during employment so that they may get a certain allowance as a matter of right when they are out on the streets. “But for this to happen, we have to spend three per cent of the GDP,” he said
Other than the unemployment factor, the PPP has promised to construct a million new houses and expand the scope of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP). Poverty alleviation and the provision of safety nets for the economically vulnerable have been the core pledges in its manifesto.

Regarding the social sector, the PPP has conceived programmes to address a wide spectrum of issues that, it says, will reform health and education.

In its manifesto, the PML-N says that to implement its planned ‘Right to Food’ policy, it will formulate in consultation with provincial governments a National Strategy for Food Security to achieve an average agricultural growth of at least four per cent per annum over the next decade, evolve an equitable system of food procurement and distribution, improve the access of poor households to food at affordable prices, and evolve a transparent system of safety nets for very poor households.

The PML-N plans to introduce a transparent system of income support programme for needy families, with a special focus on widows, orphans and the girl-child.

The PTI manifesto promises to accord the highest priority to poverty alleviation through policies aimed at creating more job opportunities and targets to achieve100 per centenabling ownership of assets by the poor. It immunisation of children against preventable diseases, to ensure universal access to clean drinking water by setting up water filtration plants, to initiate major low-cost housing programmes in urban areas under a revised national housing policy, and to initiate construction of half-a-million new housing units each year.

The youth would be the focus of PTI’s education, healthcare and economic plans. Under a national youth policy, they would be actively involved in rural re-construction, drainage and sanitation, social forestry, public health awareness campaigns, environment protection and adult literacy, says the manifesto.

The PTI manifesto plans to introduce and implement new laws, policies and programmes to provide a level playing field for the social, political and economic growth of women; to provide free education to girls up to the tenth grade; to introduce scholarships for higher education; and to develop a national programme for vocational and skill-based training for income generation.