KARACHI, May 27: How many poor people are there in Pakistan? This was and it still remains a very irritating and embarrassing question for all those who are running the affairs of this country since October 12, 1999.
But then poverty is so all pervading and armies of unemployed men and women are so conspicuous in every province, division, district, tehsil, city, town and village of Pakistan that it is impossible to conceal facts. The government has found an easy solution to address this issue.
President General Pervez Musharraf claimed early this month before the members of Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry that the trend of a rise in poverty has been reversed in the current fiscal year. He claimed that the incidence of poverty has been reduced by 0.8 per cent during the current fiscal year 02-03 ending next June. How did he arrive at this conclusion was a question that none of the members of Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry raised.
The Export Promotion Bureau has recently come out with a new publicity campaign claiming that a 20 per cent increase in exports in the current fiscal year backed by over 10 per cent growth in industrial production has given employment to one lakh persons in the current fiscal year. There are two questions. Has anyone carried out any employment census recently to verify the fact of the generation of one lakh new jobs? Can any statistician confirm that one lakh new jobs in the current fiscal year means lowering the incidence of poverty by 0.8 per cent.
Mr Shaukat Aziz, the federal finance minister, announced the other day before a gathering of Management Association of Pakistan that he expected the incidence of poverty to come down to 25 per cent in next five years from 31 per cent at present. He was confident that per capita income after five years will go up to 625 dollars a year from 360 or 400 dollars at present.
Last year, the government signed a long-term (10-year) poverty reduction programme agreement with Asian Development Bank to bring down the incidence of poverty to 15 per cent by 2011. This involves an investment of 2.4 billion dollars in the next ten years.
The ADB counted 47 million Pakistanis as living below poverty line. The ADB representative in Pakistan held a press conference in August last year in Islamabad and estimated poverty ratio in Pakistan at 35 per cent. He disclosed that every year 12 million people are added to the ranks of poor people.
Dr Hafiz Pasha, a well known economist, a former federal minister and adviser estimated the number of poor Pakistanis at 50 million. In a lecture at Karachi University this week he offered a very bleak picture of Pakistan and blamed inequitable land holdings as one of the key factors that have contributed to rural poverty. Dr Pasha is now Assistant Secretary General of United Nations Development and Planning.
The Social Development and Policy Centre, a respected and reputed private research organization once headed by Dr Pasha has said that Pakistan’s Standby agreement with IMF in 1999 pushed 7 million people down the poverty line. Budgetary measures are drawn up within the framework given by IMF and World Bank and has added to the miseries of the people.
The World Bank released a comprehensive document on “Pakistan: Poverty Assessment, Vulnerabilities, Social gaps and Rural Dynamics”. This report was incidentally released in October last year when the military set up had organised general elections. The report studied the poverty issue comprehensively in the context of the agrarian scene, land holdings pattern, availability of health and education facilities, sanitation and clean water supply and all social indicators. The leader of the World Bank Task Force was Tara Vishwanath. The ruling elite in Islamabad found it convenient to discard this report on the ground that the author is “an Indian and a Hindu.” “She has blown up the poverty issue in Pakistan out of proportion for obvious reasons,” a senior government official had remarked. It was said that the World Bank team purposely selected poor areas for survey to arrive at the conclusion that poverty is a critical issue in Pakistan.
Reports suggest that Tara and her team members held discussions with the bureaucrats in Islamabad during August and September last year and questioned as to why the government was holding back the survey result of the Household Integrated Economic Survey (HIES).
When a news story was published on Dawn’s front page on September 25 last year, the government came out with a quick clarification that the survey data of poverty calculation during 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 have been withheld because of inaccurate methodology.
After necessary processing and correction, the government did release the results of this survey in the Pakistan Development Forum meetings recently in Islamabad. It showed that the incidence of poverty increased by 1.5 per cent during 1999-01. As against this increase, the survey showed a rise of 6 per cent in poverty during 1996-97 to 1999.
What is government trying to tell by releasing the HIES figures. That poverty ratio increased by 6 per cent during 1996-99 period when Nawaz Sharif ruled the country. This rate of poverty increase has now been brought down to 1.5 per cent during the 1999-01 period when a military set-up ran the affairs of the country.
Leaving aside the issue of credibility of the results of the HIES survey a very pertinent question is how to define poverty. Are the consumption of 2,350 calories or per capita income appropriate criteria in the determination of poverty. Or as the World Bank report on poverty assessment in Pakistan points out the issue has to be judged in consideration of availability of clean water, sanitation, education and health care. And then in a country where over 50 per cent of the rural population is just landless (roughly about 30 million people) and then large numbers of others hold farms that fall below the subsistence level. It is also pertinent to find out who enjoys the 33 per cent electricity subsidy on one lakh tubewells in the country and who gets the benefit of subsidies and official procurement of crops by government agencies.
Then there are those who have been pauperised by the government’s economic policies. Privatization in Pakistan is being undertaken at the cost of tax payers’ money and jobs of the employees. In the last three years, the government provided Rs30 billion to Habib Bank and the United Bank and relieved more than 10,000 employees from the banks to make these institutions feasible for privatization. There is no assessment as yet on the quality of lives of these over 10,000 employees after they have been laid off. Government policies have reduced the rate of return on savings and on the National Saving Schemes. The IMF wants returns on NSS to come down further. Financial policies have often been designed to serve the interests of the borrowers, nay the loan defaulters and tax evaders.
Whatever the government’s claims, the number of poor is increasing. The government has itself expressed doubts on the credibility of its own institution, the Federal Bureau of Statistics, a fund-starved institution where all unwanted bureaucrats are dumped before their retirement.