A story of neglect

LAHORE: Poverty cannot be addressed without meaningful investment in social sector as it paves way for inclusive growth.

Besides growth, investment in social sector is equally important in reducing poverty as is evident from Bangladesh that lowered poverty despite being labelled as a basket case

two decades back when it had lowest per capita income in the region and modest GDP growth.

Now its per capita income is higher than Pakistan and it is the fastest growing economy in the world after India. Our per capita income on the other hand has declined in last two years and our growth is even lower than Afghanistan.

Social sectors include education, health, and women emancipation. Social sector investment does not mean allocation of higher resources only. The judicial use of these resources is also essential.

We would not need additional schools if the existing public sector schools start imparting the same knowledge as the private schools. We are creating two diversified societies by imparting substandard education or no education in majority of public sector schools meant only for the poor.

Students of most of these public schools are overly outsmarted in practical life by the students studying in private sector educational institutions. Bangladesh has highest primary enrolment rate in the region, and we have the lowest.

This is even though the government employs qualified teachers at decent salaries and perks. Billions of rupees spent on education by the state are wasted mainly due to the inability of the government to govern educational institutions properly.

The dropout rate in public sector schools of Pakistan is the highest in the region. The illiterate youth that are in millions lack the capability to learn reasonable skills.

They mostly work as daily wagers. When the economy is in top gear, they get engaged regularly but in low growth periods like being witnessed these days most have no jobs.

We might be having more doctors, nurses, and paramedical staff than Bangladesh as well as a web of state-run clinics in the country, but Bangladeshis are expected to live three years longer than Pakistanis. The infant mortality rate in Bangladesh is half that of Pakistan. Moreover, Bangladesh is a polio free country and we are one of the two countries where polio still exists. Recently, the WHO has declared Nigeria polio free.

Our public sector hospitals and clinics are performing below par. It has given rise to mushroom growth of health facilities in the private sector.

These facilities are expensive and are affordable for the affluent segments of society only. As in education we have created two distinctive societies in Pakistan. There is a healthy society comprising people with resources and a chronically ill society comprising the poor.

Bangladesh combines economic disappointment with social progress. Bangladesh has made more efforts to improve the status of women than most of the regional countries.

Micro loans were deliberately targeted at women. They successfully ran family planning programmes that not only reduced fertility, but also raised the status of women within the household since it was, they who now controlled the size of the family.

Pakistani planners have paid only lip service towards gender equality and its population growth is highest in the region.

Textile industry that took off in Bangladesh after the 1990s has 80 percent women workers. This improved both their status and income.

Women are much more likely than men in Bangladesh to spend money on their family’s health, education, and meals, so child welfare rose. It is the other way round in Pakistan.

In Bangladesh large non-government organisations managed to scale up their programmes to work nationwide keeping the same spirit when they were small and beautiful.

Public spending would probably have been wasted and frittered away, as has happened so often elsewhere, had the NGOs been excluded.

On the other hand, the largest poverty reduction programmes in Pakistan are run by public sector organisations like the Benazir Income Support Program, Ehsaas, and Pakistan Poverty alleviation Fund.

A decade back Bangladesh’s social achievements were greater than its economic ones, but a better human resource that emerged because of social sector spending has now put that country on a sustainable growth path.

Economic growth no doubt is an essential ingredient for alleviation of poverty, but a country like Bangladesh known as basket case two decades back has proved that you do not need to wait for lots of growth. It is the commitment of the planners and executors of policies that matters most.