KARACHI, June 30: The prosperity of the people is at its peak. The income earned by each individual in the country is just a stone’s throw from $1,000 a year, which gives an average household of six, an aggregate sum of $6,000 to spend. Converted into the local currency it amounts to Rs 363,600 income per year and a fantastic sum of Rs 30,300 per month for each and every household in the country.

That is what the ‘Economic Survey’ a pre-budget document released by the Government wants the public to believe. But the trouble is that the Government’s approach to that per capita income is too simplistic: Divide the Gross National Product (GNP) of Rs 8,800 billion by the country’s population of 157.6 million people and you get Rs 55,837, which converted to US$ at Rs 60.60 would produce per capita income of $925.

The Economic Survey boasts 11 per cent increase in per capita income over the previous fiscal.

Most economists do not disputes the formula, but almost all admit that it conceals lots of ‘disparities’ and therefore camouflages the gapping hole between the rich and poor divide.

In major cities, billionaires continue to multiply their wealth. Trade, business, real estate, stock market and a host of activities are all money spinning machines. But it is not the same in say village Khoro, tehsil Gambat in Mirpurkhas.

Sultan Nasir, who has taken on the job of plying rickshaw in Karachi, says that a shopkeeper in his village earns somewhere between Rs 1,500 to Rs 3,000 per month. Sultan and his brother Nasir, the other working as a barber, together chip in Rs 7,000 every month, to feed, clothe and house a nine-member family with three school going children, living in Khoro.

But that looks like a fortune to the earnings of that cotton picking women, who toils under the scorching sun from 5 in the morning till 5 in the evening and meanwhile tends to her infant child sleeping under the shade of a nearby tree.

For every maund of cotton picked, the woman is handed out as little as Rs 30 in the evening. The income in case of collecting ‘falsa’ from the ground ranges from an incredible Rupee one to Rs two a maund. By no stretch of imagination, could her household income amount to Rs 30,300 per month.

So is there a flaw? Professor Ghazanfar Ali, a lecturer at a private business school in Karachi says that in order to obtain the true picture, the GNP ought to be broken up into components, separately identifying per capita income of the urban and the poor masses.

Muzammil Aslam economist at KASB has fewer tears to shed. He believes that the benefits of strong economic growth of 7.0 per cent; the recovery in overall agricultural growth at 5.0 per cent and major crops at 7.6 per cent at the back of highest ever production of wheat (23.52 million tons) in the country’s history and an impressive 22.6 per cent increase in sugarcane production (54.7 million tons: the second highest production level in the history) and other crops have gone to improve the lot of the rural folk.

“Due to the commodity price boom, farmers and intermediaries have both benefited — thus increasing rural income”, he says.

Independent workers and labours have jacked up their daily wages: a construction worker who pleaded for work on daily wages of Rs100, now touches a brick for no less than Rs300 and a ‘mistry’ or carpenter now demands Rs550, compared to Rs250 two years ago. Muzammil admits the absence of an income distribution survey and, he thinks no government is likely to come up with it, due to obvious reasons.

A disgruntled employee in a local firm, perhaps rightly pointed out that it was the fixed income group, mainly in cities, who had stood out holding the dirty end of the stick. Proprietors and ‘seths’ of local mills have frowned upon and even raised a hue and cry saying that they have been burdened with “increase in cost of production” over a (minor) increase of Rs600 in minimum wages decreed in the budget, which raises the minimum salary of an employee to Rs4,600 per month (whither the per capita income of Rs 30,300 per month?).

Economist Farid Chashmawala ponders that three groups of people have been left behind. The unemployed; the under-employed and those in the fixed income segment.

Muzammil observes that 60 per cent of the population in our country live in rural areas and add only 20 per cent to GNP, which effectively means that they are severely under-employed. Close to 80 per cent of the contribution in service-manufacturing is made by 34pc population that resides in urban Pakistan. The answer to the problem, he says, lies in the migration of labour force from the fields to the factories. “When those people are fully employed the gap between the rich and poor will narrow down”, he says. As an example he quotes China, where labour force shifted from villages to town and cities and managed to improve their income. China is now no longer known as a country for cheap labour force, as it used to be for many a decades.