After being branded as one of the world's most corrupt nations, Pakistan has earned another dismal report card. According to the Human Development Report, 2013, recently launched by the United Nations Development Program, Pakistan's social sector spending has touched the lowest mark resulting in a widening of class inequality in the country. In 2013, Pakistan's rank in the Human Development Index (HDI) has dropped to the 146th position.
The report says that Pakistan spends 0.8pc of GDP on health and 1.8pc on education as compared to 2.2 per cent and 3.1 per cent spent by Bangladesh and India on health and education respectively. Brazil, one of the best performing countries in terms of human development, spends 4.25 per cent of GDP on health and 5.7 per cent on education.

Shamefully, Pakistan's expenditure in the social sector is lower than that of some of the poorest African countries like the Congo, which spends 1.2 per cent of GDP on health and 6.2 per cent on education. The report points out that income inequality in Pakistan increased from 0.27 to 0.29 during 2000-2010. Worse still, disparities in terms of regions, social outcomes and access to productive assets are more pronounced than income inequality.

For example, the net primary enrollment in the Punjab is 61 per cent as compared to Balochistan's 44 per cent and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's 52 per cent. Similarly, the infant mortality rate in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is 76 per 1,000 as compared to Balochistan's 104 and Punjab's 82. According to the report, in 2010 the average years of schooling for children in the 20 per cent richest quintile of population were found to be 8.95 years against 2.41 years for children of the 20 per cent poorest quintile. Similarly, seven million children were out of school, of which 60 per cent were girls.

Referring to the structural problems, the report says that although the economy of Pakistan is agrarian in nature, agriculture productivity has been on the decline, with agriculture currently contributing less than 21 per cent to its GDP. With declining productivity, the potential for jobs creation in the agriculture sector is also shrinking. According to the report, around 30 per cent of the population of Pakistan consists of youth. But, unfortunately, a large proportion of the youth population - as much as 32 per cent - is uneducated with no vocational and life skills. Resultantly, labour productivity is low.

The report has also analysed the reasons why Pakistan has been falling behind other nations in the race for socio-economic development. According to the HDR, the country's politics is dominated by 100 families whose members, sitting in the national and provincial assemblies, manipulate the decision making process to enrich themselves at the cost of the common people.

The report has noted that the assemblies are filled with men and women belonging to the privileged classes, while people from poor and middle income brackets cannot enter Parliament due to the high cost of electioneering and socio-cultural constraints for women. According to the report, the voter turnout in the 2008 elections was a meager 44.1 per cent as against 87.4 per cent in Bangladesh in the same year and 59.7 per cent in India in 2009. The Pakistani people's lack of trust in the country's elections system to bring positive changes in society is the main reason for the abysmally low voter turnout here.

While noting that Pakistan is witnessing deepening societal conflicts and tensions arising out of the unequal distribution of income and access to resources, the report identifies lack of continuity in policies as one of the main hurdles to Pakistan's long-term development. It says that Pakistan experienced one of the highest rates of industrialisation in the sixties and its five-year planning tool proved to be a successful engine of growth which was replicated by South Korea. But while Korea has made tremendous progress an all sectors during the last 60 years, Pakistan's inconsistency in implementing long-term development policies has negatively impacted its pursuit of accelerated human development.

The report emphasizes that Pakistan should initiate programmes to enhance the skills and productivity of its people. It advises that learning from successful global experiences, Indonesia for example, Pakistan should either invest in improving productivity in the agriculture sector or shift the surplus labour to manufacturing. The report has quoted the example of the fast-growing Asian economies - Hong Kong, China, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan - which expanded employment by 2-6 per cent a year, while raising productivity and wages.

The report says that in the education sector Pakistan needs to enhance the effectiveness of its expenditure by investing more on development (like teachers training, curriculum development, schools infrastructure, etc.) than on spending (around 90 per cent) on salaries only. Pakistan also urgently needs to tackle the challenge of environmental degradation which costs the country at least three per cent of GDP annually with a disproportionate impact on the poor and most vulnerable sections of the population.

Between the lines, the report hints that Pakistan will further sink into chaos if emergent measures are not initiated to reduce poverty and narrow the ever widening rich-poor gap. But in Pakistan wealthy nawabs like Aslam Raisani, corrupt feudal-politicians like Zardari and Gilani and wealthy industrialists like Nawaz Sharif rule the roost, carrying on merrily in total disregard of the social explosion lying ahead.

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