Gross enrolment among female remained stagnant

Islamabad: The World Bank’s lead economist Dr Ghazala Mansuri on Wednesday said that despite declining trends in poverty in Pakistan, social sector indicators especially gross enrolment among female showed improvement from 2001 to 2007 but it remained stagnant or flat in subsequent years afterwards.

This empirical evidence based on research done by the World Bank found that the gross enrolment at primary level among female improved during the Musharraf regime from 2001 to 2007, however, it got flat during the democratically elected regimes in last decade.

“It’s a puzzle for us that why gross enrolment among female remained flat in the aftermath of 2007-8. We have not yet concluded reasons behind this stagnation as it requires more research on this subject,” the WB’s economist Dr Ghazala Mansuri said while delivering lecture on poverty trends in Pakistan organised by Planning Commission here on Wednesday.

However, Planning Commission’s Member Social Sector Asma Hyder said that social sector indicators improved a lot in Punjab and they were anxiously waiting for the release of upcoming Pakistan Social and Living Standard Measurement (PSLM) survey done by Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) that was expected to capture the work done by the Punjab government for improving social indicators.

Many other experts believe that the devolution system introduced by Musharraf regime had delivered well despite this fact that there were some gaps in terms of lack of financial autonomy because there was deadlock on resource distribution formula under NFC Award but there was mechanism of watchdog placed at Islamabad in shape of National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) that helped achieving improvement in service delivery at gross roots level.

However, in the aftermath of enactment of 18th Constitutional amendment and provision of increased resources for provinces under the latest NFC Award struck during the previous PPP-led regime in 2010, there was no local government system at place for several years. When it was placed during the PML-N led regime the provinces mostly showed reluctance for transferring administrative powers from province to districts and gross roots level. It resulted into dismal performance of social sector indicators during the democratic regimes despite this fact that the Center had increased share of provinces to the tune of billions of rupees on per annum basis.

Earlier, Dr Ghazala Mansuri said that there were reasons for consistent decline in poverty trends in Pakistan as one of the factor was increasing remittances as it went up from $1.5 billion in 2001-2 to over $17 billion in last one and half decade period on per annum basis.

She mentioned that the last Economic Census was done in 2003-4 so no one knew exactly about the size of formal and informal economy of Pakistan. The Economic Census, she said, must be done to get accurate numbers of national accounts.

She said the research evidence showed that CPI based inflation data was not cooked up as many perceived that the inflationary data was fudged to reduce the poverty. However, she said that there was urban bias in the data obtained in CPI based inflation because it was gathered from urban markets. She said that the poverty could go up by 6 to 8 percent if national level inflation was used to calculate poverty in Pakistan from 2001 to 2014-15.