Intensity of poverty falls slightly to 38.8 percent

Balochistan worst on MPI

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s overall Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has fallen from 55.2 percent to 38.8 percent of the population, but the intensity of poverty on account of deprivation of education, health and standard of living stands on the higher side of 50.9 percent.

This startling disclosure was jointly released by the Planning Commission, UNDP, and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) on Monday.

Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi have poverty headcount of 3.1 percent, 4.3 percent and 4.5 percent respectively. The poorest are Balochistan’s four districts including Killa Abdullah, Harnal, Bakhran and Ziarat as well as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kohistan district, where poverty has climbed to over 90 percent.

The intensity of poverty demonstrates that the poorest of the poor are living in acute and cruel clutches of poverty as the top threshold comes out of poverty, but the bottom poor remain deprived of basic necessities of life.

Earlier, Pakistan also revised its consumption based poverty which stands at 29 percent under new methodology of Cost of Basic Needs (CBN).

Balochistan tops with poverty headcount of 71.3 percent, while the intensity of poverty stood at 55.3 percent, followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with the headcount of 49 percent and intensity of poverty at 50.7 percent. Sindh followed with a headcount of 43 percent and intensity at 53.5 percent and Punjab remained the best performer with headcount 31.4 percent and intensity of poverty at 48.4 percent.

According to the report, Pakistan’s 38.8 percent of the population lives in multidimensional poverty, with highest rate of poverty in FATA and Balochistan. Pakistan’s MPI showed steep decline by 16.4 percent falling from 55.2 percent in 2004-5 to 38.8 percent in 2014-15. However, the average of deprivation share of the poor declined relatively little from 52.9 percent in 2004-5 to 50.9 percent in 2014-15.

Progress across different regions is uneven as poverty in urban areas is 9.3 percent as compared to 54.6 percent in rural areas. Disparities also exist across provinces.

The report found that over two thirds in FATA (73 percent) and Balochistan (71 percent) live in multidimensional poverty. Poverty in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa stands at 49 percent, Gilgit-Baltistan and Sindh at 43 percent, Punjab at 31 percent and Azad Jammu and Kashmir at 25 percent.

There are severe disparities between districts as poverty in Punjab’s district of Attock stood at 9.9 percent, Jhelum 8.5 percent while it went up to 64 percent in district Muzzafargarh, and Rajanpur 64.4 percent.

In Sindh, Karachi’s poverty stands at 4.5 percent, Hyderabad 25.7 percent while it increased to 87 percent in Tharparkar, and 84.7 percent in Umerkot.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the poverty in Haripur stood at 24.7 percent and Peshawar 31 percent, while it went up to 92 percent in Torgarh, and 80.2 percent in Shangla. In Balochistan, Quetta’s poverty stands at 46 percent and Kalat’s 57 percent, while it gets worst in Killa Abdullah at 96.9 percent, and Harnal 94.2 percent.

UNDP’s Country Director Marc Andre Franche said there were many regions and districts lagging behind and enormous efforts were required to ensure their progress for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) envisaged by Pakistan till 2030. Dr Sabina Alkire, Director, OPHI, said that the robust way of calculating poverty on the district level after every two years could result into finding the right kind of interventions. She cited the example of Mexico and other countries where MPI was used for policy prescription, adding it could be used as a tool for achieving the SDGs.

Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal said that by accepting the findings of the MPI, the government was taking more responsibility to meet the people’s demands in accordance with Article 37 and 38 of the 1973 Constitution. He said that the report highlights gaps at district level that puts more responsibility on the local governments. Due to legal hitches, he said, the local government system was not fully functional. “But it will become operational very soon,” he added.