Comment: Our social crisis

LAHORE: Pakistan’s economic performance has often been described as paradoxical, but the real paradox is far graver.

Despite decades of GDP growth spurts, remittance inflows and moments of macroeconomic recovery, our social sector indicators resemble those of a state running on empty.

Education has not kept pace with demographic pressures, health outcomes lag behind regional peers, and the gender gap remains among the widest in the world, effectively locking out half the population from social and economic participation.

This disconnect is not accidental. It is the direct outcome of policy neglect and a ruling mindset that sees social development as a slogan rather than a national priority. While official statistics create a comforting illusion of progress, the reality tells a starkly different story — one of inequality, exclusion and institutional indifference.

Despite credible global reports ranking Pakistan poorly on governance, corruption, infant mortality, human development and law and order, these findings rarely spark debate in power corridors. They are absorbed and forgotten, dismissed as routine criticism and lost in a media cycle where issues are raised without persistent follow-through. As a result, chronic failures, from malnutrition to learning poverty, fade into the background noise of national discourse.

Part of the problem lies in the misplaced obsession with GDP, a figure that economists worldwide now agree is a poor indicator of people’s wellbeing, especially in developing countries. Pakistan celebrates aggregate growth figures while ignoring how that growth is distributed. Over 60 per cent of the country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of the richest 15-20 per cent, while the bottom 20 percent subsists with almost no resources. Yet development programmes — whether designed by international donors or domestic planners — continue to rely on average per capita GDP, a measure that masks deprivation and excludes those most in need of support.

It is time Pakistan flips the development lens and evaluates itself through GDP, income and the Human Development Index (HDI) of its bottom 20 per cent, not the national average. Doing so would reveal a far more accurate, and far more disturbing, picture. Pakistan already ranks 168 out of 193 countries on the global HDI in 2025, and the position of its poorest citizens would be considerably worse. Their life expectancy, educational attainment, and income levels would paint a profile of deprivation more severe than what current national numbers suggest.

This blindness to inequality has deep roots. Successive governments have poured enormous sums into rural development and slum improvement. Yet rural Pakistan remains deprived, and urban slums have expanded relentlessly. Money was never the issue, governance was. Funds were allocated, but the services they were meant to improve never materialised. The same pattern continues today. More schools are built but with absent teachers, more hospitals constructed but without doctors, medicines, or functioning equipment. The result is predictable — resources wasted, outcomes unchanged.

As noted by development experts, the typical administrative response to criticism is not problem-solving but more rules and regulations, as though paperwork could compensate for managerial collapse. “They forget that ours is a soft state,” she notes, “where very few rules are ever enforced”. The solution, therefore, to build the capacity and integrity of institutions responsible for delivering services.

Pakistan stands today at a breaking point. A country cannot progress when its children cannot read, when mothers die preventable deaths, when half its population is sidelined economically, and when its poorest citizens are invisible in national planning. Economic stability without social development is a temporary illusion — the foundations eventually crack.

What Pakistan needs is not another five-year plan or another donor-funded project. It needs a new development ethic — one that measures progress by the wellbeing of the poorest citizens and holds institutions accountable for outcomes, not expenditures. Until that shift happens, GDP may rise or fall, but the people will remain trapped in cycles of poverty, inequality, and despair. A nation grows only when its people grow. Pakistan, unfortunately, has been growing only on paper.