DEVELOPMENT-PAKISTAN: Reversing Growth in Poverty a Tall Order

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Muddassir Rizvi

ISLAMABAD, Nov 12 2003 (IPS) - As the time for breaking the fast approaches at the sunset, people start gathering outside a palatial house in a posh residential neighbourhood here in the Pakistani capital. They come for free food that is arranged by the rich occupants of the house for the poor and the needy during the holy month of Ramadan.

"An average of 200 people come here everyday to break the fast and also take food to their homes," says one of the attendants at the food camp. "We serve anybody who comes here, irrespective of his or her economic background. It is the holy month of sharing and blessing."

One of the regular visitors to this "free food camp" is Sadiqa, 35, who comes here walking at least four kilometres from her village in the foothills of the Margallahs, the mountain range that makes Islamabad’s skyline.

"I come for free Iftari (the time of the breaking of fast is called Iftar and food served at the time is usually referred to as Iftari), and also take some food back home for my little children," adds Sadiqa, the widowed mother of six children.

She says that she could not survive on her meagre income of less than 3,500 Pakistani rupees (less than 65 U.S. dollars) that she generates by working as domestic labour.

"There are good, God-fearing people like this (referring to the sponsors of the free food camp) who keep on helping us with food, hand-me-down clothes and at times money. I also get to take day-old food from some of the houses I work in, which saves me quite a lot of money," she explains.

She is now looking forward to the income of her 16-year-old son, who recently started working as cleaner and conductor on a public transport vehicle. "He is under training now, but soon he will be making around 60 rupees a day (a bit more than one US dollar), which will be a great relief," she says.

But to earn a dollar a day, her son had to drop out of seventh grade at a government school, perpetuating the cycle of penury.

Though still poor, Sadiqa is happy that she does not have to beg out in the streets, though she sleeps every night worrying "how will I get food to my children tomorrow". She adds: "But I have faith in God. I have faith that He has created us and He will not let us die hungry."

Perhaps it is this faith that prevents the more than one third of this country’s population living in abject poverty from giving up hopes for better times.

Thus far, the government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), devised under agreement with the International Monetary Fund, has yet to dent poverty, and its benefits are far away from people like Sadiqa.

"Governments come and go. They say they will eradicate poverty, but that doesn’t happen. We are worse off now than we were 10 years ago," says Mohammad Babar, who works as a driver in Islamabad to support his three-member family back in a village in the Pakistan portion of Kashmir. He dropped out of school eight years ago after his father died in a road accident.

For critics of the government’s policies, Babar is right in pointing to the hollowness of promises made by successive governments in the past to tackle poverty, which according to the Islamabad-based Dr Mahbub ul Haq Centre for Human Development, is a "ticking bomb".

A latest report by State Bank of Pakistan only points at the acuteness of the problem, suggesting there is no relief in sight in the near future.

"Given the carryover of the past legacy, current geopolitical and security situation, non-supportive external economic environment, and weak institutional capacity, it will simply be a pipedream to expect an accelerated fall in the incidence of poverty in Pakistan in the short term," Bank said in its report for the financial year ended Jun. 30, 2003.

The bank’s report, one of the severest indictments of the official poverty eradication policies over the last 15 years, says that a reversal in poverty cannot take place until economic growth is put back on the trajectory of a sustained rate of six percent over the next five years and pro-poor policy interventions are faithfully implemented.

"The current rate of growth (a bit over 5 percent) can only arrest a further rise in the poverty incidence," the central bank says.

According to Rashida Haq of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), between 1969-70 and 1979, absolute poverty declined at all levels due to the start of large-scale overseas migration to Middle East.

"The trend continued in the 1980s until around 1987 to 1988, after which for the most part there has been another rise in the incidence of poverty in the country," she said in a research paper published by PIDE. But poverty incidence has risen to 33.6 percent in 2003, according to the State Bank’s report.

Haq attributes the rise in poverty to sluggish growth, macro-economic imbalances, absence of social safety nets, decline in the flow of remittances from overseas Pakistani workers, shedding of surplus labour by state-owned enterprises and deterioration in the quality of governance.

"The biggest challenge facing the economic managers in the short term is to create as many jobs as possible," says Ishrat Hussain, the central bank governor who is a former World Bank official.

But Hussain also says more government investment is needed in social sectors and in human development. "A large population is Pakistan’s biggest economic resource, but it will be a source of strength only if properly developed through extensive investment in education and health," he says.

The government, on the other hand, seem to be hoping to reduce poverty through its PRSP, which has come under severe criticism of civil society due to interventions that it says resembles the infamous structural adjustment programme of the eighties.

"They are creating unemployment by privatising even the state utilities that are making profits. At the same time, the government is overemphasising private investment even in areas as vital as education and health. How is this all going to change the situation?" asks Asim Sajjad Akhtar, who heads Pakistan Rights Movement, an umbrella organisation of social and labour group.