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| WB says rural Sindh getting poorer |
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
By Mehtab Haider
ISLAMABAD: Instead of building on the initial advantages to become the country’s growth engine, Sindh has been gradually losing its position of pre-eminence owing to persistent decline in its share of growth, increased poverty, unemployment and worsening of social indicators, says the World Bank (WB) in its report on Sindh.
The WB’s report titled ‘Securing Sindh’s Future — The Prospects and Future Ahead’, which is available with The News, states that Sindh has the highest incidence of absolute landlessness, highest share of tenancy and the lowest share of land ownership in the country.
“The wealthy landlords in Sindh with holdings in excess of 100 acres, who account for less than 1 per cent of all farmers in the province, own 150 per cent more land than the combined holdings of 62 per cent of small farmers with landholding less than 5 acres” the report says.
With 99 per cent gross primary enrolment, 72 per cent literacy rate and 87 per cent of babies fully immunised, urban Sindh’s social indicators are comparable to other developing countries with similar per capita incomes.
On the other hand, with 58 per cent gross enrolment at the primary level, 38 per cent literacy rate and 62 per cent of babies fully immunised, the level of human development in rural Sindh is arguably one of the worst in the region, it further states. Sindh has the worst gender ratio among all provinces and the development indicators of its rural females have remained stubbornly low.
Sindh’s per capita income was nearly 55 per cent higher than the rest of the country at the time of independence; it was only 36 per cent higher by the early 1990s; and the difference was further reduced to 16 per cent by 2004-05.
Its share in national GDP, the WB states, has fallen in almost all sectors, with the largest declines recorded in large-scale manufacturing, finance and insurance, transport, storage and communication sectors.
“In 2003-04, there were nearly 610,000 unemployed persons in Sindh and nearly 500,000 persons are likely to get added each year to its labour force for the next 10 years,” the report states and warns that without a sustained growth rate of around 7-8 per cent per year, the number of unemployed in Sindh could rise to as high as 1.6 million by 2013-14.
According to the World Bank, Sindh’s development indicators are not only low in absolute term, but are growing less rapidly relative to the rest of the country.
For example, Sindh’s literacy rate increased by 5 percentage points, from 51 to 56 per cent, between 1998-99 and 2004-05, while the corresponding increase for the country was 8 percentage points, from 45 to 53 per cent. With 41 per cent net primary enrolment rate, Sindh under-performed the country by 1 percentage point in 1998-99; the gap widened to 4 percentage points by 2004-05.
The percentage of households with access to roads in Sindh exceeded the national average by 2 percentage points in 1998-99; it fell below the national average by 7 percentage points in 2004/05. Sindh’s poverty headcount ratio increased from 23.4 to 40.4 per cent between 1995-96 and 2001-02, while the corresponding numbers at the national level were 30.1 and 36.4 per cent respectively.
The World Bank says that Sindh’s developmental problems have been in the making for a long time, a period through which different forms of governments and varying political parties were in power. Attributing any specific problem to the policies of any particular government or political party is purely accidental.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
