On the evening of Jan 23, Dawn had the following lead news items on its website: the rape and murder of an eight-year-old child, a follow-up on the death of a young man murdered in a fake encounter, a student’s attack on a teacher, the ‘alleged’ gang rape of a transgender, a follow-up on the death of a professor and another on the death of a student beaten by his teacher, and the murder of a college principal. These were the ‘top’ stories of Jan 23.

Faisal Bari

If a professor asks a student not to disturb the class, how do we go from there to the point where the student leaves the class, comes back with 10 other people, ransacks the school and assaults the teacher who had asked him not to disturb the class? What pathways of thinking make this option — of asking 10 people to join in — a feasible and plausible one? Why didn’t anyone of these 10 people tell the student that this is not the way we address grievances or deal with disagreements? Why was dialogue not an option? Why this quick escalation to the level of causing serious physical harm? Whatever the level and nature of the initial provocation, are there no thresholds before we move to physical violence and serious harm?

What is the responsibility of an individual who sees another person being harmed?

Take the case of the murder of the college principal. He had supposedly confronted a student about his absence from classes. He might have even tried to shame the student about his lack of punctuality and his priorities. But how come this came to point where the student actually shot the principal multiple times? The student reportedly said the principal had committed blasphemy. Even if he had, why did the student not invoke the law? Why did he feel that getting a gun and killing the principal was a good or viable option?

The case of the madressah student being beaten to death is equally bizarre and tragic. Is there anything that a 10- or 12-year-old can do that merits a physical beating to the point of inflicting serious bodily harm? Even if the child had not learnt his lesson, was a slacker, was disruptive, or had a bad memory, ie whatever the issue, how did the teacher think that beating him would address the problem? The pictures of the child’s body that newspapers carried showed that the beating he must have received was severe and that it was not the case of a single blow landing in the wrong place — the child was clearly hit repeatedly and with force.

First, are these the works of individuals with psychological and/or social problems or do these individuals fall within the spectrum of what would be considered normal in our society? And second, most of the acts mentioned happened in the public space and in front of others.

What is the responsibility of the individual when he or she sees something happening that is harming another person? Is action, to stop violence a duty in the legal, moral or social sense? Should it be?

All these cases seem to be of people who fall within the range of what is taken as ‘normal’ in our society. The ease with which small disputes escalate to the point of violence is hard to see as a deviance or as a product of people with psycho-social issues. If you have witnessed road accidents and how quickly people resort to verbal abuse and then physical violence, the acts mentioned here will not seem a deviation. There would appear to be little reason to invoke individual issues to explain these incidents.

The issue of duty in public spaces is even more problematic. What were the people standing around when Mashal Khan was lynched or when, some years ago, two teenagers in Sialkot were beaten to death doing and thinking? If they were active participants, this is problematic. If they were enjoying the spectacle, it is even more problematic, and if they were thinking what was being done was wrong but were not speaking out, it is still very problematic.

Unless you fear extremes of violence against yourself, not trying to stop violence against another should be socially unacceptable, morally repugnant and odious, and illegal.

If these incidents are not the result of actions of deranged minds, and it seems they are not, then we have to think more carefully about what we are teaching our children. And by teaching I do not mean what we are teaching in schools only, but what we are teaching our children at home and in social situations.

We are failing to inculcate the values of tolerance and debate, we are not being able to establish and reinforce lines around verbal and physical violence, and we are not realising the impact that violence is having by brutalising our society. A recent and continuing example is the clamouring for a ‘public hanging’ of the murderer of Zainab. The call for justice is a must. But to call for public hangings, in the hope that this will deter people while not taking into account the effect that a public hanging can have by brutalising our society is an example of the kind of thoughtlessness that has landed us in this place to start with.

This piece has just raised questions. I hope the academics and intellectuals of the country can help think through some of these issues.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Article 25-A in our Constitution makes education a basic right for all five- to 16-year-old children. For the last many years, governments have been trying to get all children in this age bracket into schools but have not been successful as yet. In fact, though the article talks about all five- to 16-year-old children, most of the focus of governments has been on getting primary education universalised — and we have not even been successful in that as yet.

Faisal Bari

It is often argued, in education policy circles, that getting all children into schools is the first priority and once that is done, we can worry about the quality of education and other related issues. And, broadly speaking, this is indeed the policy that the provincial and federal governments have been following. But, there are a number of problems with this perspective.

It’s hard to achieve universal education when we spent just 2pc of our GDP towards this goal.

The quality of education and our ability to get children into schools and, more importantly, to keep them there, are integrally linked. If children do not get a decent quality of education that can hold their interest and harness their ability to read/write, comprehend educational material, engage with the society they live in and provide options for career paths, it would be hard to keep them in schools. It would also be hard, in such circumstances, to try and convince parents and children for the latter to come to or stay in schools. Why should they? Why should a parent spend time and money to keep his or her offspring in school when the child is getting little or nothing out of it? Do we feel there is zero opportunity cost for children’s time?

Not only are we not able to cater to all children through schools (government estimates say some 22 million children from five to 16 years are out of school) we are not even able to impart quality education to the ones who go to school. How are we going to deal with the situation if, by a miracle, all children in this age bracket did end up in schools?

There is plenty of evidence that public-sector schools across the country, by and large, provide poor education. Most of the examinations conducted in the country, irrespective of their level, show poor results. The Punjab Examination Commission results for class 5 show that a significant proportion of students have not even gotten the hang of basic reading, writing, comprehension and mathematics.

Matriculation results show that a significant proportion of students fail the examination, even though it is a fairly simple one for that level, and that the pass percentage is only 33pc. A large proportion of those who pass are still unable to get admission into colleges. The same pattern can be seen at the intermediate level.

The case for education in the private sector is not very different. Barring the ‘elite’ private-education sector, which caters to less than 5pc of enrolled children in the country and charges tuition fees that only the middle- and upper-income groups can pay, most of the private education sector that is popularly known as the low-fee private sector also provides quality that is generally poor.

The examination results that we mentioned here show the poor performance of the low-fee private sector as well. A recent study that we conducted found that the returns of high-fee elite education package (better quality education, exposure to ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level examinations, and facility with English language) explain a lot of the differences in a) what sort of colleges students can enrol in, b) what sort of careers people can choose, and c) the salaries they get.

Given all this, should we still focus on enrolment first as a policy? Are we doing our children a favour by putting them in schools when we are not able to provide even a basic and functional level of educational quality through most of the schools that we have? Should we focus on bringing in reforms that target the quality of education as well?

Some might want to argue that we should be doing both ie getting every child in school and ensuring that they get a decent quality of education. This is a very sensible position to take and a lot of countries, both developed and developing, do focus on both issues simultaneously, but they spend a lot more resources, human and financial, on their education sectors. When the current government spends less than 2pc of GDP on education, how can we achieve universal education of even a minimum quality?

So, should we leave out-of-school children as they are and focus on quality-enhancing interventions only? This is the choice that society should be thinking about.

I might have my preferences on what policies should be adopted but in a democratic society decisions should be taken after an informed debate. The purpose of this article was to raise the issue of the choices before us. What we decide to do, as a society, is something that should be debated.

Whether we keep the focus on enrolment, move to focus on quality, or increase funds for the education sector substantially to be able to do both, should be a thought-out choice and not just a default position. Our collective choice will have significant consequences for our children and the future of this country.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2017

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Two years ago, a friend and colleague, teaching at a US university, wrote to me asking if one of her doctoral students working on education issues in developing contexts could work on Pakistan and if I would be willing to guide her in her fieldwork. I thought that having a doctoral student look at leadership issues across gender would be good since there was little local research on this. So I said I would support the student.

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One day I got a call from someone who said he worked for an ‘agency’ and wanted to come to interview me about some American ‘girl’ who had applied for a visa and who had a letter of support from me. I asked him to come by. Our conversation is worth reproducing.

After asking me about what I did, where I taught, what I taught, and if I had any suggestions about how to improve the economy, the gentleman came to the point. He asked me how well I knew the ‘Amreeki girl’. I gave him the context. He asked if she was connected to the CIA. “Not to the best of my knowledge,” I said. He asked me if I could vouch for her ‘good character’. I told him that I had no idea of what he meant by ‘good character’ but I had no reason to believe that the student had any character flaws that precluded her from doing doctoral work in education. He asked me as to why I was interested in getting the student here. “It is a good idea for advanced students to do research on and in Pakistan.” He did not seem convinced by my answer.

In Pakistan, rules are made to serve the powerful and strengthen their hold.

He wanted to know all the places the student would visit. I told him that I knew the districts and the schools she had in her sample and could share the list. But the gentleman wanted to know about all the places the student would visit in the evenings. I said I had no idea about that.

He asked me if I would ‘guarantee’ the safety of the student. I mentioned all the arrangements we were making for her accommodation, transport, help with logistics, and hiring of interpreter/research assistants. “This is all fine but do you guarantee her safety?” By this time I was a bit annoyed. So I said that when I cannot guarantee my own safety and you guys cannot guarantee the safety of citizens of the country, how can you ask me to ‘guarantee’ the safety of another? Again, the answer did not convince him.

He then asked me to provide documents about myself, the organisation I worked for, the kind of research we did, the partners we worked with and even copies of research papers we had written. And then, the final straw, he asked me where I lived and told me that he would come around and interview my father. I had had it by then. I told the gentleman to leave, to give whatever report he wanted to give about the issue but he would not be entertained at my home. He left.

The student did not receive any answer to her visa application for a long time and getting the not-too-subtle hint, decided to work on another country. She is now finishing her thesis write-up.

We have had an unknown number of CIA officials working in Pakistan and we have had, allegedly, Indian nationals working in sugar mills in the country. We had entire air bases given to Americans, had drones flying from there and, apparently, even had a programme where US citizens could come into Pakistan without clearances from Pakistani authorities. But when we want to have an academic come over for a conference or have a colleague come over for joint work, the hurdles in the name of national security are insurmountable.

Even doing research on our own is not easy. I work in education. Every time we have to do household surveys and/or school surveys, we have to get an umpteen number of letters of support and/or no-objection certificates (NOCs). If we want to do positional tagging, so that we can identify and revisit households or schools later, it opens up another Pandora’s box of NOC requirements. If I am going to state schools, it makes sense for me to have permission from the education department, but if I am going into households, I should only be required to have permission of the households in question. Why do I need the state’s permission to visit a citizen at her house? But we do: logic is not one of the strong points of a lot of these requirements.

The issue here, clearly, is power. Rules are made not to serve the larger interest; they are made to serve the powerful and strengthen their hold even further. Were agencies incompetent to the extent that they did not know CIA operatives were coming into Pakistan and some might still be here? I hope that is not the case. They knew. It was just that power interests were such that they wanted to allow these people to come into the country.

“Squeezed elbow room and shrinking leg space is the narrative of Pakistan in our times,” writes Harris Khalique in his new book Crimson Papers. He goes on to say: “It is about demanding a dignified physical space to live, a respectable economic space to earn a decent living, a free intellectual space to think, and an uninhibited artistic space to create. Together, it is all about political space.” So the question really is: can we imagine a different future?

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2017

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Pakistan needs to generate millions of new jobs a year if it wants to absorb the young people who are currently looking to join the workforce. And it will need to continue creating an even larger number of new jobs every year, for at least a couple of decades, since we are still going through a demographic transition and are adding more young people to the population than there are people exiting the workforce. Female participation rates in the labour force continue to be quite low. If more women were to come into the workforce as they should, we will need even more jobs.

Faisal Bari

Service-sector jobs usually tend to be less formal. In many service-sector jobs, especially at entry levels, the skill levels required are low, but many of these jobs do not change with time and so do not offer a career path to entrants. The low-entry barriers to these jobs facilitate the induction of young people into these jobs even when they have not had much education and/or skill training. At the same time, lack of career progression can be very frustrating as one cannot stay in the same dead-end job for the rest of one’s life. High-skill service-sector jobs (doctors, dentists, lawyers, nurses) usually require years of education and training.

If we want to ensure employment for our youth, we have to invest heavily in our people.

The expansion of the service sector is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. But to achieve success in the service sector, one has to make substantial investments in human capital. This is and will be, in all likelihood, Pakistan’s Achilles heel.

An estimated 25 million children between the ages of five and 16 years are out of school in the country. Even if this number is overestimated by a couple of million, it is staggering. It is almost two-thirds of the entire population of a country like Canada. Where will these children, when they become adults and enter the workforce, be adjusted? What sort of jobs and career paths will they have? Will they be able to have productive and fulfilling lives? Will they be able to provide a good life for their spouses and children? With little or no education and/or skills, it is unlikely that any of this will be possible.

Even for the millions who are in schools in Pakistan, the future does not look too bright. The quality of education imparted by an overwhelming majority of our government and private schools is very poor. Most employers find it difficult to hire even Master’s-level graduates: content knowledge of graduates is poor and sketchy and since they ‘learnt’ material to pass their exams, their ability to apply what they know is very limited. The economy of the future is unlikely to be properly fuelled by such human resource.

There are many young people who approach me for jobs. A lot of them have done their matriculation but have no skills. What sort of jobs can one find them?

We hire a significant number of young people as junior researchers as well. Apart from one or two Master’s/Bachelor’s programmes in the country, it is hard for us to find properly trained people. It is heartbreaking to have to say no to a young person who, in good faith, spent four to six years in a university pursuing a Bachelor’s/Master’s degree but still does not have the basic skills needed for relevant jobs. But that is the reality of human capital in Pakistan

We are hoping for a growth boost from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). There might well be a growth and employment boost from the investments we are making and contemplating, but the boost will neither kick-start the economy and give us sustained growth nor will it create significant employment opportunities in any sector.

Some policymakers have been hoping that cooperation with Chinese firms might boost our manufacturing sector. Some joint ventures might, indeed, happen and benefit local manufacturing, but what Pakistani firms need a lot more of is help with issues like quality management, standardisation, brand creation, brand management, advertising and just-in-time production. All of these are mostly skills and human-resource issues. Even the gains in the manufacturing sector are now dependent on our investments in the area of human resource.

If we want to ensure rewarding careers for our youth and a sustained growth path for the country, there is no way around the fact that we have to invest heavily in our people. We have to give good quality education and/or training to our children, we have to ensure they have access to good-quality healthcare, we have to make sure they live in a good environment, and we have to ensure everyone has access to decent drinking water and to facilities for sewage disposal.

And there are double rewards for investing in these sectors. Investments in human resources through health, education, skill training, basic infrastructure and environment will not only create a large number of jobs directly, it will prepare for growth tomorrow and will also ensure that future growth becomes sustainable. Our population growth rate is too high and is not slowing down fast enough. If we do not investment in our people, our future, CPEC or not, manufacturing boost or not, will be a bleak one.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2017

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

One hundred and seventy-odd children, four teachers, and two old and dingy rooms. We visited a government boy’s primary school in a village just outside Sargodha. The two rooms had been built quite some time back and were not really fit for classes. Most of the classes were held in the open with children sitting on the ground. The weather was pleasant at the time, but what must children go through in the summer or the height of winter?

Faisal Bari

But there was a silver lining. Even in these trying circumstances the four teachers were doing their best to educate these children. The system could help them more and the results could get even better.

Any group of children would have a certain diversity of abilities among them: some would be quick learners, others would take longer, some would be more coordinated than others, some would have a better memory, some would be good at physical activities, and so on. Teachers have to be not only aware of this, they have to make sure all children learn despite the diversity and, more importantly, they have to ensure that the diversity works to the advantage of the class they teach.

The coping mechanisms teachers offer in class cannot level the playing field for all students.

The diversity in children is not confined to ability differentials only. Household and community circumstances and differences also add to the diversity that children bring to classes and schools. Wealth and income level, level of parental education, gender of the child and occupation of the parents make a difference in shaping and determining what a child brings to class. A class in a rural area is likely to be quite different, in at least the background knowledge and preoccupations of children, than one in an urban area.

Household characteristics impact child ability issues at a deeper level too. If a child was not provided enough nutrition in the early years of her life, her mental or physical development might have been hampered by that deprivation. If a child is coming hungry to school, she is not likely to learn a lot in class. And our national level surveys are pointing out alarmingly high numbers for child malnutrition, even stunting.

Teachers have a responsibility to ensure all children in their class learn, and learn to the best of every child’s potential. But the job gets a lot harder if children are coming hungry to classes and/or are coming from more marginalised backgrounds.

One of our ongoing research projects is looking at the various forms of marginalisation that children encounter. Poverty, gender, geographic location and child health (including disability) are important in this regard. We are also looking at ways in which children, their families and teachers can cope with these challenges.

We find that teachers are not only aware of these challenges and issues of diversity, they, despite the constrained circumstances they work in, have some coping mechanisms for dealing with these issues. Teachers, on average, know the students who need extra help with their school work: in some schools we found that teachers had identified ‘slow learners’ in every class so that they could be singled out for extra attention. Giving extra time and/or attention to students who need help is the most common coping strategy. In some cases we found teachers experimenting with peer group mechanisms to ensure help for children with more challenges: classmates helping classmates through in-class interaction.

But, all these practices are happening at an individual teacher or school level. Student diversity is, as of now, not acknowledged as a concern by the education department and/or teacher-training department. Student diversity is a fact and we also know that given the economic and social circumstances of most Pakistanis, a large number of our children, especially in public schools, will come from marginalised backgrounds. We need to purposefully and explicitly train our teachers to deal with the needs of marginalised children.

Furthermore, teachers can only do so much to manage some issues of marginalisation. The coping mechanisms they offer in class or in school cannot level the playing field for all, nor can they address all concerns stemming from marginalisation issues.

Teachers cannot provide food to hungry children, and they cannot give uniforms and school supplies to children out of their pockets. Teachers cannot undo what malnutrition and deprivation in early childhood might have done to some of our children. For this, the government needs to step in with options like school-feeding programmes, cash-transfer programmes for poor families, nutrition programmes for young women of childbearing age, and early childhood programmes. If these are not offered, teacher efforts at ensuring that all children can learn, and explore their potential, will always be stymied.

Do we want all of our children to learn? Do we want education to level the playing field for all, give opportunities to all and allow each child to develop to his/her full potential? If so, a ‘same size fits all’ approach to managing classes and education will not do.

Children come from diverse backgrounds and bring a diversity of abilities to classes. This is especially the case for children coming from marginalised backgrounds. They need a lot more support and attention. Given the large number of children coming from such backgrounds, especially in government schools, the imperative to focus on both in-school and out-of-school interventions cannot be overemphasised.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Provincial governments have been trying to get every child enrolled in school. Public education systems, across all provinces, have gone through a plethora of reforms in the last couple of decades to achieve higher enrolments. Teacher salaries have been increased, more infrastructure facilities have been provided, there is more monitoring of teachers, teacher recruitment has been made more transparent, and a lot more has been spent on teacher training. Enrolment drives are conducted almost every year. But we have not been able to achieve universal enrolment as yet. This has been a puzzle for governments: why are the last 10-15 per cent of out-of-school children, in the relevant cohorts, so hard to bring into the system?

Faisal Bari

There is another way of looking at the problem as well. We should ask: why is such a high proportion of children in Pakistan in school at all? To me this is more of a puzzle than the fact that 10-15pc of early age cohorts do not attend school. If we ask the question this way, we can make more sense of the phenomenon of dropouts as well.

Why are the last 10-15pc of out-of-school children, in the relevant cohorts, so hard to bring into the system?

We know that the quality of education we give to the majority of children in schools, other than to the small percentage enrolled in high-fee elite private schools, is very poor. The Punjab Examination Commission (PEC) results for Grade 5 and 8 illustrate the poor levels of learning in most children. ASER surveys also show that Grade 5 children have difficulty doing Grade 2-level work. Why should children then come to school? Why should they waste time in school and not drop out early to try to find other things to do?

We know that some 50-60pc of children who appear for matriculation examinations fail them. A large proportion of children who enrol in Grade 1 do not make it to Grade 10. But even after this sorting, if a child is going to fail the matriculation examination after remaining in school for 10 years and there is a high probability that that is going to happen, why should a child and his parents have put in the 10 years of effort?

We also know that even after matriculation it is not easy to get any jobs now. So, even if a child is successful in getting through matriculation examination, his/her chances of landing a good job are not high or even reasonable.

Unemployment rates amongst graduates are also very high in Pakistan. The economy has slowed down, government jobs have all but evaporated and manufacturing has been languishing for a long time now. The Middle East used to provide relatively lucrative options but new job opportunities, even at semi-skilled level, have become limited. Most of the jobs created in our economy over the last couple of decades have been in the service sector. But, by and large, service-sector jobs are low-skilled jobs and they do not offer decent career progression for sales agents, runners for delivery companies, sales staff in shops and hosts in restaurants. The youth bulge, much talked about, with millions of young people entering the working age, is going to make it even more difficult for young people to get jobs in a slow-growing economy.

The situation for girls is even more problematic. Only 20pc or so of our female population joins the active workforce. For those who do look for work, teaching seems to be one of the few professions that is acceptable to families. But with the youth bulge and in an economy that is not growing fast enough, restrictions on choice of profession further depress prospects and returns on education. Most teachers working in the private sector do not even make minimum wage levels through salaries. If economic returns are a significant factor in people determining if they want to get educated and how much, low perceived or real returns should depress the demand for education.

The demand for education is not for jobs only. Many consider education to be a basic right and many feel that having an educated citizenry is a prerequisite for good governance and effective working of a democracy and society in general. This might be true. But such a case has never been made at a popular level in Pakistan. If we felt that having every child educated is necessary for the future of this country, would state and society not have made a stronger case for it?

The demand for private education is strong in Pakistan. If the returns on education are low, as I have argued here, what explains the demand for private education? My conjecture, and this requires more research, is that parents are buying lotteries (low-probability, high-impact events) by sending their children to private schools: most of them will not get high returns, but some will. When you send a child to a private school, you have a chance of being among the select few. But it will lead to disappointment for most.

Education, despite all the rhetoric, continues to be a neglected sector. Bringing children to schools is not education. The main issue was always that of giving quality education that would lead to better outcomes for individual recipients as well as society. We have so far failed in that. No wonder many children do not remain in school. In fact, many more would probably not even come if they had realistic expectations about the returns they can hope for from the education they are receiving.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Recently I asked a colleague, who has been living in Pakistan for a couple of decades but had spent the early part of his life in the West initially studying and then working there, if he missed being abroad and regretted his decision to move back to Pakistan.

Faisal Bari

“I can get the books I want from Amazon and other sources in Pakistan too, but the joy of browsing through a large bookshop that is well organised and looked after is what I miss. It gave me the freedom to explore my options; when I am ordering books I am restricted to purchasing the ones I know about. Coffee shops and pubs gave me freedom to discuss a lot of issues with a lot of different types of people in public spaces.

When we think of development and quality of life, we should also consider our social fabric.

“Here, I feel more restricted to family and a smaller circle of friends. Our social lives are more restricted to our homes, and the homes of friends and relatives. What those places provide is very different; they allow for a very different interaction with others and even facilitate interaction with relative strangers. Those sort of public spaces are still not as readily available in our cities.”

He added: “Most importantly, though, I miss the relative calm of everyday existence in the West. The everyday certainties of life, which remain in the background and are taken for granted over there — but not in Pakistan — is what I miss the most. The predictability of water and electricity supplies, the ease of public transport, the quality of services you can expect from both public- and private-sector providers — all of these reduce base-level anxiety in the West. Your life becomes easier due to that.”

He gave me an interesting example. One of his sons, born in Pakistan, was admitted to a public school when they moved abroad. While in Pakistan, the child had attended one of the country’s top private schools. Within a month of enrolment abroad, his son’s teacher had called my friend in for a discussion; she thought the child might have a learning disability. His son was referred to the appropriate experts who identified the learning impairment within weeks and the school, with the parents’ help, had devised appropriate coping mechanisms for him within a matter of months.

Even though the child had already been experiencing issues in Pakistan, the school did nothing nor alerted the parents to any issue, instead suggesting that he should get extra coaching as he appeared to be careless or unable to understand.

“The few years my son spent in that public school abroad saved him and us. All of us learnt how to manage his learning disability and these lessons have helped us even after we moved back to Pakistan. Can you imagine what would have happened to him if he had continued in Pakistan? Most likely, he would have eventually been thrown out of school, or he would have had to rely on rote learning to pass his examinations.”

My colleague said that he always felt more ‘on edge’ in Pakistan than he ever did abroad. “More things go wrong in our daily lives and everything takes longer to fix or address. And there is a base-level ‘breathlessness’ to living in Pakistan; a lot more happens in our lives and in society every day. In a way, it feels like entropy levels are higher in our society and so, if you want to improve in either your personal/family space or in national life, you have to work a lot harder to do that than in other places.”

I asked him if he felt that all of this might be true of any developing society, and that this might be the ‘cost’ we have to pay for living in societies that are still struggling to get their institutions right. He was not sure about that. He had not travelled enough within developing countries to be able to say with certainty whether this was just a consequence of a lack of institutional development. But he did mention that he had spent some time in Sri Lanka some time ago, and he felt that the base-level issues were not the same there. But his stay was not long enough for him to form a firmer judgement.

“I know you do not regret the decision to come back despite all that you’ve said, but would you advise young people who have a choice of moving or staying abroad to come back or stay in Pakistan?” I asked.

“It is a personal decision, but I do feel that people who are fortunate enough to have the choice should think a lot harder before making their decision. If you decide to stay in or come back to Pakistan, be prepared to deal with a higher level of entropy. It will impact your personality, your relationships as well as your ability to do things in life.”

I am not a psychologist; I do not know how deeply our personalities are impacted by our environments. But the conversation, I thought, did point out some important issues in our society and the impact they have on us that makes it worth reporting. Maybe when we think of development and quality of life, we should also be thinking about some of the factors mentioned here, and not just about the GDP, infrastructure and capital.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Rizwana completed her Intermediate and then, having no other opportunities for jobs that her family would allow her to do, started teaching at a private school near her home. She enjoys teaching. Her family can do with the income she brings, and they felt that this was a good way of keeping her occupied until marriage.

Faisal Bari

Although Rizwana thinks her salary is low, she has accepted her situation as she feels she has no other option and she knows the school will not pay her more. But she is not going to remain a teacher. She does not know if her future husband will let her teach but, even if he does, she feels that the low salary will not allow her to have a career in teaching and she would rather stay at home and focus on her family life once married.

Do we want only those people who have no alternatives to become teachers?

Shaheen finds herself in a very different situation. She is married, has two children, her husband works as a clerk in a government department while Shaheen, with an M.Ed. degree, teaches in a higher fee-charging private school. Shaheen is paid Rs10,000 a month. After transport and other expenses, she nets Rs8,000 per month.

Shaheen feels that, even with both people working fulltime, they are not being able to provide a good life for their kids and have to compromise on a lot of things, including on their own health and the care she and her husband can offer to her parents-in-law. They delay going to doctors and force themselves to be extra frugal, and never spend money on anything other than the necessities. She feels her children deserve a certain level of entertainment and enjoyment expense too, but they cannot afford it.

Shaheen does not regret being a teacher — “what else could I have done?” But she does not feel teaching is a profession that gives teachers and their families a decent life. She wants her children, both son and daughter, to do something else when they grow up. “They should be doctors or engineers or in computers. Being a teacher will not give them anything,” she says.

All provincial governments have raised teachers’ salaries in the public sector over the last decade. Although the salary levels are not enough to guarantee a middle-class lifestyle for teachers, they have risen enough to ensure a basic standard of living. But the salaries in private schools, left to the markets, have languished. The salaries of teachers in elite or high-fee private schools are higher than even government teachers’ salaries, but these elite schools are a very small part of the overall private school population. Most private schools in the country are low- to middle-fee schools. Across these schools, depending on their fee and location, the salaries of teachers range between Rs2,000 to Rs15,000 or so. Salaries above Rs15,000 to Rs20,000 per month are quite rare in these schools.

How is a teacher supposed to live on Rs10,000 and provide for her/his family? Some recent research has argued that about Rs17,000 to Rs20,000 per month is needed for a family to have a decent basic level of living.

Even the minimum wage, for 40 hours of work per week, is Rs13,000 to Rs14,000 per month. Why are teachers in private schools not covered under the legislation? In KP, teachers have been taken out of the category of ‘workers’ to which the minimum wage law applies. In Punjab, although the legislation covers teachers, the provincial government does not want to implement the law. Even in the case of Punjab Education Foundation-assisted schools, the PEF and Punjab government do not want to implement the minimum wage legislation for teachers.

Some have argued that since teachers are only in schools five to six hours a day, the minimum wage does not apply to them. But teachers work after school the world over and grade homework and prepare for classes. Why should this not be taken into account? And teaching is a fulltime job; why should the time spent in school be the criterion for judging how much teachers work?

Do we want teaching to be a ‘profession’ that gives decent returns and is able to attract people to it? Or do we want only those people who have no alternatives to become teachers? And do we want them to be poor despite being employed fulltime?

Low-fee schools, currently, have a cost advantage over public schools. But this advantage is largely driven by the difference in teachers’ salaries. If we impose a minimum wage or other salary, it will force schools to charge more or shut down if the parents in their locality cannot afford the higher fees. This expected disruption is stopping governments from intervening in the market for teachers. This is definitely an issue that needs careful consideration. But it cannot be a reason for not allowing teachers to have decent salaries.

We, as a society, have to figure out who is going to pay for the education of our children. If we go by the constitutional promise under Article 25-A, it should be the government and the society at large.

But, it seems, right now we want to have our cake and eat it too: education for as many as possible and without society paying for it. This is partly being done at the cost of teachers in the private sector. This, surely, cannot be the solution to the problem; teachers have a right to have decent returns too.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

COMMENTS on a number of my recent articles have stated that I have focused on delineating/diagnosing issues and have not given solutions. This is an attempt at starting that conversation.

We have been talking, broadly, about inequalities in our society. Inequalities not just in wealth and income, but also in power, education, health and other political, social and economic areas. How do we address inequalities that are deeply entrenched in the fabric of our society and are embedded in not only our institutions and organisational set-ups, but in our ways of doing things, ways of being and even in our ways of thinking about ourselves and others?

Faisal Bari

A decade ago, I was working on a research project with a colleague who, though based in England, originally came from South America. Given the increasing inequality trends in Pakistan, I asked him how he compared Pakistan with South America as they have had significant inequalities too. He said that one glaring difference was that people in Pakistan, especially from the lower-income groups, were too ‘obsequious’.

“The doorman at the hotel I am staying at, why does he act as if I am his lord and master? I understand his duty is to welcome people and open the door for them. But why does he grovel as if he is nothing and I am some higher being? Almost the same thing is true of the driver who is taking me around. Again, being courteous is one thing, but being servile is totally another.”

Are our inequalities so entrenched now that they have warped our sense of personhood too? And will this be an issue when we try to initiate reform? At the very least, we have to keep this in mind when we are thinking of the kind of reforms we want to take up and the probability of their success.

Reforms to address something very basic and entrenched will also have to be very basic and large. We will have to restructure entire institutions and established ways of doing things to impact real outcomes. And the reform effort will not only have to fight the inertia and apathy mentioned here; it will be resisted, tooth and nail, by those who stand to lose from it. This might explain why there is no reform effort in Pakistan currently and why all calls for tabdeeli, political or not, have not garnered the enthusiasm that is even minimally required for starting the process of change.

A lot of debate, especially from status quo supporters, has been around the fact that it is growth that will eventually address our concerns of inequality and poverty. They argue that if we move to eight per cent to 10pc growth per year, poverty will go down. This is the argument that as the size of the pie increases, all will benefit. The other popular analogy is that rising water will raise all boats.

I do not find the argument convincing. Historically, we have seen that while poverty has been going down, even in times of mid-level growth, inequality has been increasing whether growth has been high or low. As we follow the growth agenda, we open up opportunities for all but the ability to benefit from these opportunities is not equally distributed. And there is no reason to think that even over time those who are behind today will catch up. They can fall behind even further.

This is exactly what is happening in the education field. Initial inequalities in opportunity are determining whether you get an education and of what quality. They are determining your future and the future of coming generations. The rich go to elite schools, get good quality education and do well. Their children get the same breaks and can do even better when the economy grows. The poor either do not get an education or get a poor quality one, and cannot get good jobs. They pass on this poor opportunity set to their children.

Reform will have to start with major redistribution and ensure high levels of continued redistribution across time as well. How do we redistribute? Clearly, it cannot be done through taxation alone. Our taxation system is not effective or progressive. But, more importantly, even if it was, it would not be able to change existing wealth inequalities by much. So, going forward we have to think of ways of both a) changing the current wealth distribution, and b) changing how future incomes are distributed.

Irrespective of your ideological position, if inequality is to be addressed, the above two conditions will have to be met. We have to bring land reforms back on the agenda. Land reform is not just about taking land from large holders and giving it to the landless; it is also about making land markets efficient, distributing state-owned land and making land use more effective. We have to reorient our taxation system to make it a lot more progressive. We have to bring back inheritance tax, gift tax, wealth tax and implement an all-encompassing progressive income tax. And on the expenditure side we have to reorient expenditure to ensure that basic investments needed for providing some equality of opportunity to all (good quality education being a big part of this) are effectively made.

This is just the start of a conversation and we will go into details later. But even now, one thing should be clear: if inequality is to be addressed, it will not happen by tinkering with the current system. We will have to re-engineer not only most of our institutions and organisations and way of doing things, we will have to change our thinking about citizenship and its claims too. The last, more than anything else, will be the hardest to address and might be the stumbling block against initiating reform.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

On July 19, newspapers reported that a married man who was having an affair was killed in an ‘honour killing’ allegedly by the relatives of the woman he was involved with. One report described the murder thus: “A man died on Monday after five attackers chopped off his arms, lips and nose, taking away his severed limbs with them.”

Faisal Bari

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported that more than 1,000 women were murdered in the name of ‘honour’ in 2015.

Two questions arise: why does ‘honour’ get provoked so easily in Pakistan and why does it lead to murder so often?

There have been attacks against many on the basis of who they are and what they stand for.

Feudal roots, illiteracy, the domineering position of overt religiosity in society, weak institutions and a wobbly law and order situation are all factors but these have been around for a long time. The new entrants are the rising intolerance and the narrowing of the mainstream of thought in Pakistan. Anger is triggered by the slightest deviation from the ‘norm’ and from what is expected of a person in a given situation. Some overarching ‘sense’ is outraged. The higher ‘principle’ invoked might vary from situation to situation, but the general trend remains. Something somebody says or does offends someone’s sense of sanctity of honour, tradition, morality, religion, sect, ethnicity, tribe, gender, nationality, patriarchy, or family. At the minimum they rant and rave on social media about how they are ‘outraged’, but, quite often, they take matters into their own hands and want to teach a lesson.

If many people are angry and they happen to be together, violence ensues easily. About six years ago, two teenagers were beaten to death by an angry mob in Sialkot. People thought, at the time, that these kids were robbers. They were not. But even if they had been robbers, is that any reason for beating them to death? Morality was invoked and the resulting anger, easy to see in the videos of the event, led to the merciless and cruel beating of the two boys. Policemen stood by and watched the whole incident.

There have been attacks against many on the basis of who they are and what they stand for. Women, the transgender community, religious minorities, ethnic groups and certain sects have all faced the brunt. We have lost more than 50,000 people to incidents of terror. Our mosques, mausoleums, schools, colleges, shopping malls and bazaars have been attacked. The cost of ‘outrage’ has been monumental.

Why does it matter if one person or even if many people feel outraged at what another has said or done? Unless there is an imminent physical threat, incitement to hatred/violence, why should a person’s or even a nation’s outrage matter? And if it does, there are laws and legal institutions for prosecution. How did we come to the point where people feel they can take the law into their own hands?

This is where I believe the rot has happened over a long time and where all of us are guilty: we have led and followed each other down this path. When people raised issues about not having Urdu as the only national language, we responded by calling them unpatriotic and resorted to violence. When people asked for provincial autonomy, we did the same. We decimated the left after calling them anti-Islamic. We did and do the same to secularists. When the state responded to a situation through violence, whether through illegal detentions, disappearances, custodial deaths or pre-emptive strikes, we stood by quietly.

We have used religious sects, political parties, and different ideologies against each other to further the aims of the state (national unity/ strategic depth). How can we today expect that all of this will not lead to a narrowing of the mainstream, rise in intolerance and a resort to violence when an ‘outrage’ is perpetrated?

Not only are legal and other institutions of the state weak, they stand compromised. We do not expect neutrality from them. If we are a ‘favoured’ sect or group, we expect active protection and support of state institutions when we commit violence in the name of any ‘larger’ objective that the state, tacitly or directly, endorses. I, as an individual, know state institutions for justice and law & order are weak and I have a good chance of getting away with murder. In any case I know my actions will not be condemned by a sufficient number. They may actually be supported by many similar-minded people. Violence and even murder become an easier option under the circumstances.

Media and educational institutions could have offered us a way out and been a paddle for us. But, at the moment, they are a part of the problem. Media, though quite free, in the race for ratings sensationalizes and adds to the frenzy. Our education system, based on poorly written textbooks, rote learning and dependent on teachers who have come through the same system, produces narrow-minded individuals. If there is going to be a change, media and educational institutions will have to be in the vanguard. But the question is: how will change come?

Lest we forget, the problems are not just the lack of deterrence effect of punishment or probability of getting away with the crime, the self-righteousness of individuals/groups, narrowing of the limits of acceptable behavior, reduced tolerance and the acceptance of outrage as a justification of violence are the culprit. The latter have happened over decades and with the connivance or acquiescence of most people in the country. We are reaping what we have, so carefully and willingly, sown.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Do a girl born in a poor household in rural Balochistan and a boy born in a rich household in Karachi have the same or even a similar set of opportunities in life? Are their chances of acquiring an education similar? Do they have access to comparable healthcare services and facilities? Do they have equal opportunities for access to physical infrastructure and the freedom of movement and association?

Faisal Bari

Distribution of opportunities is highly unequal in Pakistan, and the differences are of many dimensions: income, wealth, gender, caste, ethnicity, sect, religion, rural/urban and provincial. But, more importantly, these inequalities are very deeply entrenched in our social, political and economic fabric. Our institutions, organisations and ways of doing things are structured to perpetuate this inequality and deepen it across generations. A poor child is likely to remain poor in his/her lifetime and his/her children are likely to remain poor too.

Our society and institutions are structured to perpetuate inequality across generations.

Socio-economic inequalities, and their entrenched and self-perpetuating nature, are the biggest challenge we face in shaping a future for Pakistan. It is easy to find challenges that Pakistan faces: there are plenty of good candidates. The fundamental one is inequality and what perpetuates it. But, and here is the perplexing part, despite its fundamental nature, it is one issue that is not even on the agenda for discussion or on the reform agenda.

People have been concerned about terrorism and extremism. Right or wrong, the government, with most stakeholders in agreement, came up with Operation Zarb-i-Azb and the National Action Plan to deal with it. We have been concerned about stabilisation and, right or wrong, we have been shoving stabilisation policies, under the guidance of the IMF, down everyone’s throat. We have become concerned about growth and, right or wrong, we have responded with investments in energy, infrastructure and now through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project.

But where is the response to the highly unequal access to opportunities in the country? Where is the outrage against this blatant neglect of the rights and needs of the majority? The politicians are not interested in the issue. There is no debate on the issue in legislatures, there are no policy options on the table, and there is not even an articulated demand or ideological approach by any political party on this larger question.

There does not seem to be any articulated demand from the public for addressing this issue either. Elections are not lost or won on the issue of addressing equality of opportunity: the provision of quality education/skills training, basic health, access to good social/physical infrastructure, and employment and growth opportunities.

Though we often talk of both the free, highly vocal and developed mass media in the country and the free and independent judiciary, they have not been instrumental in raising fundamental issues of rights and opportunities. The media produces more heat than light through the debates that incessantly go on. The judiciary has not taken up any of the fundamental issues — be it the right to education, healthcare or employment or questions of access to resources through land reform — at all. Cases filed on these matters with the higher courts have been languishing for years.

Is it not a fact that the hold the upper classes have on society is very strong, not only in terms of managing access to resources but even over the power to start and sustain debate? The upper classes, the top five to seven per cent, the main beneficiaries of the current system, do not have an interest in starting a debate on rights and equality of opportunities: they stand to lose the most. But, in addition, it seems that the people who rise to middle-class level (the professionals), the subsidiary beneficiaries of the current system, also see their benefit in perpetuating the system rather than in challenging it. They are co-opted.

But if we feel we can address terrorism, extremism, ethnic strife, sustainable development, high growth, and income and employment generation without addressing the issue of opportunities for all, we live in la-la land. If we believe we do not have the resources to provide a basic level of services to all, we are wrong again. Kerala, an Indian state that boasts developed society level statistics on education, health and well-being, provided basic health and education services to all when it was a relatively poor state.

Many people also feel that there is a trade-off in growth and expenditure on basic services. They are wrong. Human development theories have shown that. Empirical evidence is also there. Kerala was not the fastest-growing state in India when it extended basic services to all, and many critics thought this extension would limit Kerala’s growth prospects even further. Today, Kerala stands at the top of the list of Indian states in growth and income terms.

If a poor girl from rural Balochistan does not get almost the same opportunities as a boy from the middle or upper class from Karachi, our dreams for a better Pakistan will remain just that: dreams. And, in reality, we will continue to live the nightmare that we currently face.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

By Faisal Bari
Jul 1 2016 (Dawn, Pakistan)

I WAS a graduate student in Canada in 1995 when Quebec held a referendum to decide whether it wanted to remain a part of Canada or become independent. Parti Québécois, arguing for secession, was in power in Quebec at the time and the sentiment for separation was very strong in the province.

The province was deeply divided and emotions were running high. For the separatists, it was an opportunity of a lifetime — in fact, for many of them it was the culmination of a lifetime of work to bring Quebec to the point of a referendum. For those who wanted to stay with Canada and for those who lived in other provinces of the country (the latter were not voting in the referendum, of course) even the prospect of a break-up was traumatic.

Faisal Bari

The vote was held on Oct 30. Separatists lost by a mere 54,000 odd votes. Voter turnout was almost 94 per cent. A mere 0.4pc swing in vote could have given the separatists a victory in the referendum.

One can imagine the agony of those who had worked all their lives for a vote for separation. They were so very close; yet, in the end, they lost by the smallest of margins imaginable.

I walked the streets of Montreal as the results came in. It was quite a night. With every small victory or defeat, there were cheers or tears. Announcement of the final results brought a tremendous outpouring of emotions.

But, and here is the point of this article, at no point during the night of changing fortunes were there any signs of trouble in Quebec. There was no rioting or fighting between rival camps. Even when the final results were announced, and there was tremendous jubilation in one camp and anger and depression in the other, there were no incidents of violence across the province.

The law and order situation was normal the next morning too. Businesses opened as usual and daily activities continued. There was a spate of retirement/resignation announcements from Parti Québécois leaders and people knew that the case for separation had been buried for quite sometime, but the results were accepted and society moved on.

Whatever one’s views on the Brexit vote, there was a mature acceptance of the results.
Since the vote had been lost by a mere 54,000 odd votes, there were some voices that asked for recounts and talked about the unfair role that the federal government had played in the build-up to the vote and there were even some voices that talked of vote fraud, but, by and large, all government and important players accepted the results and moved on over the course of the next few months.

If the separatists had won on that day it is unlikely the aftermath would have been as smooth: the federal government might not have accepted the results, questioning the legality of the referendum as the sole means of deciding on secession or any announcement of freedom from the provincial government. But, we will not know about this as the country did not go down this path that day.

I was in the United Kingdom last week when the European Union membership referendum took place. The build-up to this referendum was a lot more divisive. The result was expected to be close and so the campaigning by both sides was hard. The general impression was that the UK would vote to remain in the EU; but the results were different. The turnout was more than 70pc and it would have needed a 2pc swing in vote to make the other side win. So, though the vote was close, the win, for people wanting to be out of the EU, was not a small one.

As the results started coming in on the night of June 23, there were celebrations in one camp and a lot of depression in the other. Given the result, it was expected that there would be consequences. Markets reacted early the next day. The pound lost a lot of value and the stock market also took a hit. But this was expected. Prime Minister David Cameron’s statement helped calm nerves. He accepted the vote and the decision of the people. He said this was not the direction in which he wanted to lead the UK and so would, after due process, step aside and let the voters pick new leaders for the future, but he would work in the interim to ensure that the transition was smooth.

There have been quite a few incidents of racism that have been recorded in the UK since the results were announced. There is a high level of uncertainty that immigrants and workers, especially from Europe, face at the moment. Politicians from all sides have condemned the incidents, and the authorities have taken action in cases where they have been called in. This trend will, hopefully, go back to the baseline very quickly.

A lot of things are still very unclear and will need to be worked out. Leaving a union such as the EU will take a lot of work and can only be achieved over a period of time. New laws have to be made, new treaties have to be negotiated and new processes have to be put in place.

Leaving the union does not mean the UK will not have trade and other relations with the EU. But the basis for these relations will have to be worked out. And a lot of this work will have to be done through negotiations as there are no existing blueprints for exits from unions. And this process will be disruptive and will have costs for the people of Britain and Europe.

But, again, the lesson from the referendum, was about how the vote was handled, the maturity with which the result was accepted and the handling of the aftermath. There are a lot of lessons here for our democracy.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Excerpt:

Some reports suggest that more than 150 infants have died in Sindh`s Tharparkar district since January of this year alone. However, officials of the government of Sindh`s health department have said that 140 is the fatality toll for children under five years since October last year. Either way, does this not come close to the number of children who were martyred in the gruesome attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar?

Most of the reports have been saying that Tharparkar had less than average rainfall last year and the dearth of water, combined with some shortage of food and medicines and other healthcare facilities have been the main cause behind the deaths.

Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, in his work on the Great Bengal Famine, has shown that even at that time, a period of drought and severe grain shortages, it was not the scarcity of grain that had caused the famine and led to the death of thousands of people. It was the intransigence of the colonial government, its lack of care for the locals and the absence of any accountability mechanism that would hold the colonial masters responsible for the welfare of the people of Bengal that had led to the disaster.

There were grain stores in Bengal and in other parts of the country. The colonial administration did not release these stores to ameliorate and address the shortage. The Bengali population did not have the cash or the capital to buy the grain from the open marl(et as the price of grain, given the shortages, had spiked. It was the lack of purchasing power combined with the colonial government`s lack of willingness to address the problem that caused the deaths of thousands and more.

Is the problem any different in Tharparkar? We do not have any water shortages, at least to date, in the rest of the country. We do not have much of a water shortage even in other districts of Sindh. Wedo not have food shortages in other parts of the country. We do not really have a shortage of medicines, doctors and other medical personnel in most other parts of the country. Why should a shortage of these things exist in Thar? Most large cities, be it Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad or Rawalpindi, do not produce enough food for their own consumption. They do not produce enough milk locally either. In some cases, even the underground sources of water under these cities are not enough. In each of these, cases we transport food, milk and water from the rest of the country to these cities. The population of the cities gives money for not only the food, it also pays the transport cost included in the price of these items. Those who buy these goods are those who are able to afford them.

Why is it hard for the government or private businesses to transport goods and services into Tharparkar if they are available in the rest of the country? The answer seems very obvious. The child deaths in Tharparkar are a result ofgovernancefailure.If there is a water shortage, why is the government of Sindh or the government of Pakistan, not making arrangements to have more water being transported to Tharparkar? If there is a food shortage, it seems easy enough to move food to Tharparkar. The same should be the case with medicines and medical personnel.

It might well be the case that the people of Tharparkar are not able to pay for the cost of the transported commodities. But why should this be seen as a problem? The government of Sindh and the federal government can easily offer a special package to Tharparkar for the duration of the drought. If we can spend billions on F-16s, corridors, motorways and underpasses, what is the problem in spending a few billions on the poor children of Tharparkar? Blame games have been played between Sindh government and the federal government as to whoseresponsibility the children of Thar are. Neither can escape blame irrespective of what the 18th Amendment and other legal provisions might say. If a child dies in Tharparkar, all levels of government are culpable.

But the 150 odd deaths show that the governance system in the country is broken. If it is poor children dying in a backward district, no one cares, and no one is held accountable. Is this any different to what happened in the colonial times? The citizens of the country can also not escape blame. We have failed to bring more pressure to bear on the provincial and federal governments to address the issue. And if governance systems are not worl(ing, we should, as citizens, have organised more of an effort to get help to the children and their families in Tharparkar. Each one of us is to be blamed. As part of humanity, as part of the citizenry, the people of Tharparkar have rights over us. They have the right to be treated as equal citizens, and they have equal rights to a life of dignity as well. We, each one of us, have denied them these rights. We have not lived up to our obligations.

Most of the families who have been suffering in Tharparkar are poor. Does poverty mean they have no rights? Does it mean that the state, provincial and federal, can ignore them with impunity? Do the poor have fewer rights? Do they not deserve a life of dignity? Can the citizens of Pakistan ignore the plight of the people of Tharparkar? As human beings, as moral beings and as citizens of the same country, we should be worrying about what is happening in Tharparkar and we should be putting pressure on our government to do more, and organising ourselves better, as citizens, to help those in needin Tharparkar.m The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Whichever way you parse the data we have it shows that poverty headcount in Pakistan over the last decade and a half to two decades has decreased substantially. Initially, it was thought the data was not good enough, that it had been manipulated and so on, but even after multiple rounds of national surveys, the same trends are evident. And though the actual percentage of the poor may vary with the method one uses, the trend of falling poverty remains invariant. There must be something to this trend.

Poverty headcount, by the old line, has reduced to below 10pc in recent surveys. It is common practice, when poverty headcount goes below 10pc odd, to rebase the poverty line so that it gives some meaningful numbers. Social policy, if it has to work with less than 10pc odd of the population, is not as effective and/or useful. When all sorts of analyses confirmed that Pakistan`s poverty headcount had indeed gone below 10pc, the ministries of finance and planning, with help from the World Bank, decided to rebase the poverty line. This rebasing was announced a few weeks back.

According to the new poverty line and numbers, poverty headcount is around 29pc of the population.

At the same time, the perception in the country is that poverty, if it has not gone up, has not decreased. How does one square this circle? There are other puzzles here too. While the poverty reduction trend seems to be robust, malnutrition and stunting incidence, especially in children, seem to be on the increase.

If the population is able to meet their basic caloric needs, as well as purchase other necessities, why are malnutrition and stunting incidence increasing? Are people choosing to eat and feed their children poorly? Why would that be the case? There are some systematic changes in buying patterns in terms of a shift from non-processed food to processed food, an increase in meat consumption compared to lentil consumption, but these do not explain the malnutrition increase phenomenon.This is a very important puzzle to resolve.

Infant mortality and maternal mortality numbers have also been, more or less, stagnating over the same period. If poverty has come down, why is itnot translatinginto better health and longevity outcomes for people? One possible explanation here is that health outcomes are not only tied to the income level of a household but to availability of good quality public goods: water and sanitation facilities, healthcare facilities, and environmental conditions. Even if the income of a household increases, they might still be drinking poor quality water or using pits for waste water disposal and/or living in an environment where solid waste is not collected from the streets.

We know that a lot of Pakistani children suffer from diarrhoea and have worms in their digestive tracts and one major reason for both of the above is the fecal-to-oral route. We also know that drinking water quality, across the country, has been deteriorating. So, stagnation in health outcomes might have to do with lack of provision of needed public goods. And it might not be possible, now, to move on infant and maternal mortality and health outcome issues without major investments in public goods provision.

An even more interesting issue is that we do not really know why poverty has come down in Pakistan. What have been the determinants of reducing poverty and what has been driving it? It is definitely not tied to GDP growth in Pakistan.

Over the last 15 odd years only two to three were reasonable-to-high GDP growth years (2004-2007).

In other years, growth rates have been quite poor.

But poverty, even over slow-growth years, has continued to decline. At the same time, we have also seen increases in inequality in Pakistan. And the government has not been very active on the redistributive side as well. so, if the economy is not growing fast, and there is no redistribution of existing resources happening, how is poverty coming down?There are a couple of promising hypotheses here. Some researchers think remittance flows have been increasing substantially and they might explain the reduction in poverty. This, to me, does not sound too promising an explanation.

Remittance numbers are not that large, but more importantly, remittance flows are unevenly distributed across Pakistan andit should be possible, through careful analysis, to see if higher poverty reduction has been achieved in areas where remittance flows have been larger.

Some researchers think that it is growth of the informal economy, over the last decade and a half, that explains the reduction in poverty. Our GDP series does not capture the informal economy very well.

So, if there has been growth in the informal economy, it is possible to see reductions in poverty without seeing a significant connection with GDP growth rates. We need much more detailed micro level work here to see if growth in the informal sector is indeed what is driving the reduction in poverty.

Poverty has reduced but we do not understand why and we do not understand the movement, or lack thereof, in correlates. Why has inequality increased? How come poverty reduction and GDP growth rates are not related? Why has malnutrition increased even as poverty has come down? Why are we not seeing reductions in infant and maternal mortality and why are health outcomes not improving? What other investments, in public goods, are needed to move correlates in a desirable direction? It is time the poverty debate in Pakistan moves beyond the numbers issue. We need to understand the dynamics of poverty and poverty reduction better. This is imperative for designing effective social-sector policies.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

I could not find a parking spot on the side road and saw that some cars were parked off the main road. So I tried parking there. A traffic warden came up to me and said I could not park my vehicle there. I asked him that since some cars were already parked there, why could I not do the same.

He said that one car belonged to a lawyer, another to a journalist, the third to a bureaucrat and the fourth to an army man. `If you are from any of these categories you can park here, other wise I will fine you,` he told me. I told him I was a teacher. He said: `Then you can certainly not park here.` I informed him I wrote columns for an English daily.

He replied: `The angrezi press does not count.` So I ended up parking somewhere else.

Our society is built on lines of distinctions.

Essentially, all distinctions are based on power though they might manifest themselves through wealth, income, connections with other powerful people, education, caste and even religion. In the end, your worth and what you can do or get away with are dependent on the power you wield or the power that you can convince the others you have.

Societal rules, formal or informal, legal or moral, apply at different levels, depending on the power you have.

A retired general accused of treason, even murder, is allowed to travel abroad for `medical treatment`, but a friend, employed in a public-sector university, has been trying to get a no-objection certißcate to proceed on a short vacation abroad for about a month. She has not had any success so far.

Ministers have recently been on television defending the first family and their offshore companies and holdings and telling us that nothing wrong has been done and no law has been broken.

But if, as a citizen, I have to move more than $10,000 out of the country, through the formal system, it takes me days of hassles to be able to do that. Andif I do it illegally and am caught, I can spend years in prison. An acquaintance, a Thai citizen, after working in Pakistan for some years, was going back to Thailand and was carrying $20,000 on her person. This amount constituted her life savings. She was caught at the airport and spent the next year in jail. It was only diplomatic intervention that got her out eventually. She lost all of her life savings as well.

Those who are employed, at senior levels in the formal sector, pay approximately 25pc in income tax on their salaries. They do not have a choice as they get salaries after income tax deductions from their employers. They pay an additional 16pc or so in sales tax on everything they purchase. In addition, there are other smaller `special` taxes that are imposed on mobiles, petrol, cars, road usage and so on. On the whole, they end up paying something like 55pc to 60pc of their income in taxes. They do not have an option. They are in the tax net.

If you talk to traders and agriculturalists, most of them are not even in the tax net. Out of those who are, most end up paying 5pc to 15pc of their income in taxes. In one case, a factory owner and retailer who owned a two-kanal house in one of the best suburbs of a large city, had four luxury cars in his house, and relied on a diesel-run generator for electricity, was paying income tax that was onetenth the amount that a mid-level management, salaried person pays. Where is the equity in this? Some of the recent lessons from research in development economics have highlighted the importance of institutions in ensuring sustained development. Most notably, Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson shows the importance of institutions. They argue, and very convincingly, that what explains the variation in development, across nations, and the ability of a nation to keep itself on a sustainable path of development is the ability of the nation to forge fair andequitable institutions that a) have legitimacy through acceptance and agreement of the governed, and b)ensure reasonable equality of opportunityfor allcitizens.

Developed countries have, in some places, 50pc marginal tax rates (for the rich). Some developing countries have tried the same as well. But in developed countries, there is more acceptance of these tax rates and there is better than reasonable compliance as well. In many developing countries, even authoritarian regimes, success has been rare.

Acemoglu and Robinson argue that other than issues of differing documentation rates across countries, the main explanation for success and acceptance in developed countries comes from the consent of the people atlarge and the expectation that higher tax rates for the rich will lead to better services for all, including the rich, but especially the poor. People will get better health and educational services, social security and other essential services. In developing countries, the connection to both equity and service delivery are weaker and the connection with `consent` is almost never there.

We seem to be telling our people that if you can get away with it, you should. And laws only apply to those who cannot get away with flouting them. If institutions are based on arbitrariness, rules are applied selectively, consent of the governed is mocked and equity issues are ignored, our development process, despite all efforts, will remain nonconsistent and we will keep experiencing spurts of growth that we will not be able to sustain.

Can the democratic set-up of the country make a break from the past? Currently, it seems that the democratic set-up, offshore and all, is just reinforcing the poor governance outcomes of the past.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan