Where do the people really stand?

For months, we have been hearing Prime Minister Imran Khan insist that it was impossible to impose a lockdown to curb the increasingly rapid spread of the coronavirus and the over 2,650 deaths that have so far come with it because this would hurt the people of Pakistan, who the PM pointed out were poor, hungry and unable to survive a lockdown.

In the confused messaging going out from the government, he did not say how these people, the poorest of whom are of course most prone to the coronavirus because of their congested living conditions and poor access to healthcare, were to avoid the disease and possible death. Today, the situation is already so grim that it is next to impossible to find a bed, leave alone a ventilator, in public-sector hospitals. It is unclear then whether it is better for the poor to die of hunger, as the PM fears, or of Covid-19. Hunger is being dealt with through the enormous generosity of ordinary people and agencies working to deliver food to those most in need.

The extraordinary concern of the PM for the people of the country, and even for those in India with an offer going out to share details of the government’s Ehsas Programme with the Narendra Modi government in New Delhi, is certainly not reflected in the budget for the fiscal year 2021. We accept that the government faces a difficult situation with huge chunks of the budgetary pie which now looks increasingly unbalanced going out to debt servicing, defence and also administration.

In fact, the administrative burden of the government has been increasing as the number of public sector servants requiring pensions and salaries increases. In this situation, far more radical measures will be required to actually help the people the prime minister feels so strongly about.

Instead, we see the cut in the Public Sector Development Programme, expenditure of only seven percent on development as a whole, 2.3 percent on education and less than that on health. The figures for education and health fall far short of UN recommendations on minimum amounts for both sectors and are amongst the very lowest in South Asia. We can only ask how people are expected to improve their quality of life in such circumstances, with or without a pandemic.

Even the spending on Covid-19 is only around Rs70 billion in total, hardly enough to repair a health infrastructure which is close to collapse, with doctors saying it is unable to take in more patients or provide them the care they need. The situation of both the health and education structures have been pointed out consistently for years, with the poorly equipped situation in hospitals, notably in remote areas, pointed out internationally after the 2008 earthquake. More than 20 years later, we stand at virtually the same spot.

The question of what can be done is for experts to answer. The situation is not an easy one. But in other countries around the world, radical reform and a different vision has enabled people to rise higher in life and access amenities denied to them in the past. While the rest of India struggles against poverty and the rising ignorance and bigotry it helps breed, the state of Kerala in the south has since the late 1950s focused on building the lives of its people. The result is that today, the literacy rate stands at around 95 percent and health cover is almost universal. This is an extraordinary feat for a state which has limited resources and limited support from the federal government.

We see similar patterns in other countries including sanction-hit Cuba and Vietnam, which after a devastating war which ended in 1975 against the world’s largest superpower which it effectively defeated is now able to offer healthcare to over 87 percent of its people and continues from one year to the next to expand levels of literacy. It is then not impossible to offer people social safety, even in difficult circumstances, and the opportunity to at least obtain medical aid in a time of crisis. Today, even the relatively better off beg for help to obtain space in hospitals, with only the most wealthy of course able to turn to private care and its luxuries.

We wonder precisely what the government is thinking of. What is the National Command and Control Centre actually doing? How can we offer a uniform education to our children, as promised by the PTI government in its pre-election campaign, with the lowest budgetary expenditure in South Asia, standing below even that of Bhutan and Nepal which spend over six and five percent respectively of their GDP on the education of their children, and in doing so build for themselves a future. Such a future has already been built by Bangladesh with an admirable literacy rate of 71 percent, well above Pakistan’s 60 percent – which in some regions falls to under 20 percent.

Certainly, the current budget will not help the people the prime minister is so concerned about. It will not push back Covid-19 either, or enable healthcare workers to combat it more effectively or keep themselves safe. We recognize their difficulties. But even then, it is the task of governments elected by people to find solutions; to find ways to better the lives of those who elected them.

This is best demonstrated by the policies and the budgets they put in place. We see in the 2021 budget nothing that will improve the situation of people all over the country. We wonder also about the status of planning when there has been a cut in the budget for the Higher Education Commission at the same time as the decision to put in place online learning at universities across the country. There have already been protests from students, notably in the former tribal areas, Balochistan and GB that the lack of internet facilities and limited access to technology for impoverished families means a huge imbalance has been created. The HEC has said it will continue with the online programme and that students who cannot keep up should simply drop a semester. This seems heartless in a country where so many families struggle desperately to provide their children higher learning.

The room for maneuver available to the government given the pressures it faces from various quarters is limited. But then, as Imran Khan has so often said, every challenge must be met and that he himself is determined to lead from the front and overcome problems so that Pakistan can join the ranks of countries whose people are truly being lifted out of miserable existences.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com