RURAL Sindh suffers from huge development deficit. No doubt, one sees roads, bridges, parks, colleges and universities in the cities, but inter-city roads are in a shambles. And the vast majority of villagers live in poverty, deprived of a decent livelihood.

No significant development has taken place in the countryside with dictators from Zia to Musharraf merely patronising a few feudals to keep themselves in power. The majority of people live in shabby conditions and are deprived of basic amenities of life like proper housing, sanitation, medicare and clean drinkable water. The underdevelopment and deprivation the people are facing, are not new but have been piling up since no government -- democratic or dictatorship--, did anything substantial to alleviate these sufferings.

The fillip side of the social and economic development is that, it has not impacted the life style and livelihoods of people; they still live in the medieval era.

The poverty has further increased by last year’s flood and also because of soaring unemployment. John Maynard Keynes had rightly said the key function of state is to create employment, and for that, he opined that it is good if private sector comes forward to invest in development but if it is not coming forth, it is the state’s responsibility to invest and create jobs. The Sindh government has failed to provide employment.

Joblessness is breeding social evils that retard the transition of the economy from traditional to modern, keeping it under the rug of feudalism. Rural Sindh badly needs to be industrialised to generate jobs for its teeming jobless millions.

The province is rich in natural resources, having huge reserves of oil, gas and coal. It has two seaports and Karachi is the financial hub of Pakistan. Some of its provincial districts have industrial zones but these have been hit by lawlessness.

Sindh produces almost 72 per cent of total oil and gas production of the country, but its hinterland is still one of the backward regions with soaring poverty, high rate of unemployment and widening inequalities between rural and urban Sindh.

When oil and gas was exploited, it was believed that poverty will become history and Sindh will be rich like Dubai. But this hope has remained a mere pipedream. According to corporate social responsibility principles, oil companies have to spend one per cent of their earnings on the development of the local areas to establish schools, hospital and building roads but nothing meaningful is happening.

According to research archives of Participatory Development Imitative (PDI), oil companies are supposed to give production bonus that is meant to be spent on the development of the oil producing area.

But instead, till recently production bonus was given to federal government. After long advocacy and struggle, a sum of Rs2.5 billion was given to Sindh government and surprisingly that money is still lying unutilised, not being spent on the socio-economic development of oil-producing districts.

For instance, look at the plight of Badin district which produces 60 per cent of the country’s oil but the plight of its people is alarming. It ranks at number 90 in the Human Development Index of 106 districts of Pakistan.

Sindh is home to one of the large reserves of coal. Experts estimate that just two per cent usage of Thar coal can produce 20,000 mega watts of electricity for the next 40 years.

These experts opine that the coal power generation would cost Rs5.67 per unit while power generated by independent power producers costs Rs9.27. The good thing at the moment is that work on the development of Thar coal is going on under thesupervision of the eminent nuclear scientist Samar Mubarak Mand.

Benazir Bhutto considered democratic governance central to sustainable development, strengthening of democracy and democratic institutions. In fact, democracy is about enhancing people’s capacities and giving them choices.

Youth, especially business graduates should be encouraged to open up business; new training centres should be opened in order to meet the needs of skilled labour which is a key to the whole process of development.