Another ‘package’
September 25, 2012
On September 9, floods washed away 90 percent areas in the Naseerabad and Jaffarabad districts of Balochistan, affecting 1.3 million acres of agro-land and causing a loss of about Rs18 billion to farmers and growers. The irrigation system was also badly affected because two main canals and their distributaries irrigating millions of acres of land were left in a shambles. For two weeks after the torrential rains brought ruin to the region, around 0.1 million victims sat under the open sky, taking refuge on the banks of the Rabi and Pat Feeder canals, waiting for assistance. Despite the top district official’s claim that 90 percent of the area had indeed been washed away, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority took 11 days to declare an emergency because it didn’t have the assessment report from the district government. In essence, the flood victims of Balochistan were left trapped between the rigidity of the bureaucracy and the callousness of an inefficient provincial government. Now, finally, there may be some good news: the prime minister has announced a package of Rs2.6 billion for the rehabilitation of the people and the rebuilding of the infrastructure of the province, as well as Rs400,000 each for families of those who have perished in the floods.
Positive news as this may be, we know that the mere allocation of money is never enough, especially in Balochistan. Despite the best of intentions and the loftiest of announcements, official indifference and irregularities in the aid distribution mechanism have combined to ensure that the affected see very little of the funds allocated for them. Few relief items arrive, ending up in the hands of a few influential people. Local politicians have been known to intervene in the dispensation of relief goods and unjustifiably allocate them to voters and close relatives. What is needed, thus, is not just the announcement of hefty aid packages but also the systematic streamlining of the aid distribution mechanism to prevent it from falling victim to cronyism, corruption and mismanagement. Most importantly, the provincial government needs to be made to give up its parochial, greedy ways. For instance, even in the face of the recent devastation in Balochistan, the provincial government blocked the collection and distribution of supplies by NGOs in what was seen as an attempt to grab hold of the funds and supplies provided by international and national aid agencies. While this tug-of-war between the provincial government and NGOs went on, the miserable, broken people of Balochistan were left to fend for themselves. Also take the example of the Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan package, which promised the moon when it was first announced in November 2009 but whose implementation has been severely hampered by bureaucratic red tape and severe lethargy at the political end. At the end of the day, what is missing in Balochistan is honesty of purpose. The federal and provincial governments must both demonstrate that their words of support are indeed supported by tangible action on the ground, and hence convince the Baloch that they are also equal and precious citizens of this blighted country.
Poverty pictured
September 25, 2012
The incumbent government has always been shy of publishing precise figures for the actual levels of poverty in Pakistan. The linkage between an unpopular government and its failure to reduce poverty is not an election winner, but on Monday a detailed report was published on just how poor we are. The picture that emerges is that there is no uniformity about poverty in Pakistan, and that rural Pakistan is a far poorer place than urban Pakistan. There is no uniformity across the provinces either, and as much as this is a picture of poverty, the report by the Sustainable Development Poverty Institute (SDPI) is also a picture of relative wealth. Fuel prices are universal in their application, and yesterday’s rises are going to hit the rich and the poor equally, but the impact of the rises will not be proportional with the poor less able to absorb the increase than the less poor.
One third of our population live below the poverty line – 58.7 million people – and 21 percent of all households fall into the category of ‘extremely poor’. One-third of rural households are extremely poor compared to only eight percent of urban households, a startling disparity and as clear a reason as any as to why the countryside is becoming depopulated by the flight to the cities. Unsurprisingly, Balochistan is the most poverty-stricken of the provinces. More than half of all households – 52 percent – live in extreme poverty, the most severe of the indices. Poverty in KPK and Sindh stands at 32 and 33 percent, reflective of the national average. Punjab is the least poor and thus, by definition, also the richest of the provinces with 19 percent of households living at or below the poverty line. Even within the provinces there are wide variations. Lower Punjab is poorer than upper Punjab, but is not rated as in ‘extreme’ poverty. Kohistan is the poorest district in the entire country – 89 percent in extreme poverty. Jhelum has only three percent of households living in any degree of poverty. Poverty is thus a patchwork of deprivation; it is not equally spread across the country and presents the greatest challenge to the poorest provinces. Unequal resource allocation means that mechanisms to reduce poverty, none of which are cost free, do not ‘trickle down’ to where they are most needed and the cities are growing at an unsustainable rate. The SDPI report could be a useful planning tool when devising poverty reduction strategies, but that will depend on whether the federal and provincial governments accept the reality of some uncomfortable figures. A strong political will has to play the decisive part for even the slightest improvement in the situation.