KARACHI: Nearly two months after the elections, little appears to have changed on the ground in terms of the pressing issues such as rising food prices and inflation. A number of incidents have been reported recently regarding riots over power and food availability, or suicides driven by poverty and unemployment. Yet there appears to be a growing recognition that these issues did not surface overnight and, most importantly, no quick or easy solutions are in sight.
Given the vociferous public debate about the various ills that have plagued Pakistan for decades, Dawn approached a number of urban professionals to inquire about the means through which the situation could be addressed. Through this limited survey, the general perception proved to be that the earlier government’s faith in the trickle-down effect had not worked and efforts needed to be made to introduce changes from the bottom-up –that urgent interventions are required to improve the lives of the poorest sections of society first.
To 35-year-old Mohammed Nasir, an accountant, the main question for the government to consider is the number of people benefiting from its decisions. “The bottom-most rung of our society must be the immediate beneficiaries,” he said. “The government must change its own mindset –for many years it has undertaken measures that help the already well-off, the already employed or the reasonably educated. This is what must change: the highest levels of education or healthcare must be provided to the poorest of the people, since they are the ones who need it most. The rich can afford to wait.”
Saying that a productive labour force would generate its own income, Mr Nasir suggested that the highest areas of government expenditure should be in primary, secondary and vocational education for the masses, and small industries, since they are in the majority. “Take machine-readable passports, for example,” he said. “That was a hugely expensive project, and no doubt necessary, but the government must think about the number of people who regularly travel internationally. If so much money is spent there, a similar amount must be spent on raising the levels of education and skill-sets of the poor majority.”
These views were echoed by teacher Khurram Ahmed. “Government policies have increasingly become urban-centric – car financing and affordable cellular phone technology are examples,” he pointed out. “But at base we are an agricultural country; that is where the most people are employed. So we must help the poorest of the farmers, the small growers, benefit from modern technology. The government’s policies must be targeted towards this. Making tractors cheaper or providing financing does not make much difference because the farmer who tills just one acre cannot benefit. But if the government rented out tractors for low amounts such as a hundred rupees a day, the productivity of that farmer’s land would improve because it would be better tilled, and the farmer’s standard of life would improve.”
Expressing the view that ownership of goods was less important than benefit for large sections of the population, “why invest more in car financing than public transport,” he asked. “Why road instead of rail? Why IT instead of primary education, particularly when the beneficiaries of the former are the few people who already have access to education and subsequently employment?”
Similar points were raised by lawyer Cyril Almeida, who told Dawn that “not only does an elected government need to take measures, it also has to be seen to be taking measures.” For example, he explained, it was necessary to drastically reduce budget expenditures, whether it was the military budget or the inordinate amount spent on the executive. “This may not necessarily alter the macro economic issues in the long run but it will send out the right signals,” he said. “Meanwhile, there is an urgent need for targeted subsidies for the poor. We need, for example, food safety nets for the poorest three million people, and this can be achieved through methods such as voucher cards or subsidies.”
In the medium-term, according to Mr Almeida, there is a need to invest in agri-business since Pakistan has a comparative advantage in the agricultural sector – that is where employment is generated.
“The big issues are poverty and inflation,” he pointed out. “Other areas, such as providing consumer goods, can wait because the people who benefit from such schemes have some breathing space. The white-collar worker will probably not struggle to merely provide his family with food, but the small-farmer does. And while this is not to deny the existence of urban poverty, it is worth looking into the factors that force people to leave the rural areas. Perhaps reverse migration can be made possible, which will concurrently ease the burdens on cities.”
Can the citizenry realistically expect such steps from the newly elected government? According to advocate Faisal Siddiqi, yes. “The people who are currently in government know what the main priorities are, they know the causes,” he told Dawn. “While they may need technical advice in terms of implementation, the economic and external/internal issues are clear. Of fundamental importance right now is political stability.”
Mr Siddiqi believes that if the current coalition remains intact, there will be relative political stability and this will create the space for debate about what needs to be done and how best to do it. “The politicians are not stupid,” he said. “Far from it. One of the revelations since Nov 3, for example, was that the politicians understood what most lawyers could not: that the issue of the restoration of the judges is not a legal issue but a political one. So yes, I believe that this government has the wherewithal to address the fundamental issues – as long as they maintain political stability.”
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