KARACHI, Aug 29: Speakers at a moot on poverty on Tuesday bitterly criticized the yawning gap between government policies and their actual implementation, accusing the rulers of being insincere with the poor masses.

The two-day national conference on urban poverty was jointly organized by the National Poverty Alleviation Programme-UNDP and Aga Khan University here.

Dr Kaiser Bengali, Dr Mehtab S Karim, Dr Asma Bukhari, Dr Pervez Tahir, Dr Mohammad Irfan, Prof Dr Inayatullah Faizi and other experts presented their presentations on various aspects of poverty on the concluding day on Tuesday.

They said a policy was not what the government says will be done, but rather what had been done in view of the said objectives. They were of the opinion that the rulers in Pakistan had never been sincere to implement their policies. They said polices were not being implemented simply because the ruling classes never wanted to implement them, as they were afraid of a real change and hence trying to prolong status quo.

They said that the elite always got benefits during all kinds of governments here. They said the implementation of policies had never been the headache of the elite class as their vested interests were always served by Pakistani rulers, who had always betrayed poor masses.

They also argued that another reason of non-implementation of polices was that these policies were either made in drawing-rooms or imposed on rulers from outside, and hence they had nothing to do with harsh ground realities.

“Don’t believe that the poor can continue to be befooled. There is a widespread frustration about the gap between rich and poor. People are seething with anger against the inequitable distribution of resources and are ready to destabilize societies, which are resistant to change,” they warned.

They said poverty alleviation was not a separate sector as touted by the IMF and the World Bank.

The speakers said that the policies in Pakistan were not being implemented because there was no political will. They added that there was no political will because there was no agency to own policies. They said that generally polices in Pakistan were imported and slapped over its people.

Throwing light on results of rapid urbanization in Pakistan due to heavy influx of internal migration due to miserable socioeconomic conditions in over rural areas, the speakers said that overcrowding, burden on infrastructure, unemployment, mushroom growth of slums, rampant poverty, gender inequalities, low literacy and medical malpractice were the direct outcomes of urbanization.

They said that the so-called market solution could not solve the problem of poverty. They argued that according to the market solution the labour, like capital, should have right to move freely, but in fact immigration laws were toughened by the capitalist countries to check the movement of labour. They said that historically migration had been an asset, but in modern free world labour force had no freedom to move freely according to the basic principle of market economy.

When asked to define poverty, Dr Kaiser Bengali said when a woman having a little money mulls over whether to buy milk for her child or medicine for them from this money, it might be called poverty.

Regarding the poor standard of educational institutions, the speakers said education was being commercialized in Pakistan. They said educational centres were made 'shops' and teachers employees of these shops. They said that the rulers had never given education its right status in society.

Regarding the healthcare sector, they said that Pakistan was a TB burden country where HIV/AIDS cases were also growing. They said in 1987 there had been one case of HIV/AIDS in Pakistan and today the number of these cases was 3393. They said at present some 78,000 HIV positive people were in Pakistan. They said effect of urbanization, including increased poverty levels, was fuelling HIV epidemic by making the poor more vulnerable to the HIV.Earlier, on the opening day of the moot, the speakers linked the growing poverty in Pakistan to bad governance and misconceived polices. They said persistence of poverty in Pakistan was neither accidental nor because of natural causes.

“It is the result of misconceived macro polices, which our governments have consistently followed during the last 59 years.”

They said it must be admitted that the poor had been surviving in spite of the state, and not because of the state.—PPI