Zafar Iqbal
The government keeps telling Pakistanis that the economy is improving. The people keep asking why their lives are not. The latest figures from the United Nations Development Programme suggest that the people are asking the right question.
According to the UNDP, 38.3 percent of Pakistan’s population lives in multidimensional poverty. These are not simply people with low incomes. They are people who face several deprivations at once, in health, in education and in basic living standards. Another 12.9 percent stands just above that line, vulnerable to falling into it. Taken together, half the country is either poor or one shock away from poverty. These numbers should cause real discomfort in official circles, especially within an economic team that has grown skilled at presenting better macroeconomic indicators as proof of a wider recovery.
The comparison with the region makes the picture darker. India’s multidimensional poverty rate stands at 16.4 percent. Bangladesh’s stands at 14.9 percent. The surveys behind these figures were conducted in different years, so a precise side-by-side comparison is not possible. But no statistical caveat can close a gap of this size. Pakistan is falling behind its neighbours on the most basic measure of national progress: the condition of its people.
The depth of deprivation is just as alarming as its spread. Among Pakistan’s multidimensionally poor, the intensity of deprivation stands at 51.7 percent. In plain terms, those counted as poor suffer more than half of all the weighted disadvantages the index measures. This is not marginal hardship. It is a sustained failure to provide basic necessities, a failure that should have commanded serious government attention long ago.
These findings expose a deeper flaw in how Pakistan talks about its economy. Stabilising the external account, rebuilding reserves, lowering inflation and meeting fiscal targets are real achievements when they happen. But they are means, not ends. Their value must finally be judged by what they do for employment, purchasing power, schooling, healthcare and living standards. An economy can look healthier in official presentations while millions of households still struggle with poor nutrition, interrupted education, unsafe water and inadequate sanitation. The distance between those two realities is exactly where economic policy in Pakistan has failed, again and again.
That failure matters all the more because this kind of poverty does not stay in one generation. It passes from parents to children. A child who is undernourished and poorly educated carries that disadvantage for life. Poor health reduces earning capacity. Bad sanitation and unreliable public services impose further costs on families who can least afford them. The damage then spreads outward, into labour productivity, economic competitiveness and the country’s long-term growth potential. Pakistan is, in effect, allowing a large share of its human capital to decay while it continues to debate recovery mainly through financial aggregates.
The government’s economic managers must therefore explain how their priorities will produce measurable improvements in these conditions. Fiscal discipline is necessary. Nobody disputes that. But discipline alone is not a development strategy. What matters is how public money is spent and whether that spending works. Funds for education, primary healthcare, nutrition, clean drinking water and sanitation must be protected from cuts and used efficiently. These are not luxuries to be funded once the books are balanced. They are the foundations on which any lasting recovery must stand.
Federal and provincial governments must also face the chronic weaknesses in service delivery. Oversight is weak. Coordination is poor. Scarce resources are too often diverted to politically convenient projects that look good at inauguration ceremonies but do little for development. A new road built for a constituency matters less than a functioning school or a staffed health centre in a district where children are going hungry.
Poverty reduction must become a measurable test of economic policy rather than a hopeful by-product of it. Governments should set clear targets, publish regular assessments and identify the districts and communities facing the most severe overlapping deprivations. Social protection should be tied to better access to services and to opportunities for productive work, so that families can move out of poverty rather than merely survive within it.
Provincial governments carry special responsibility here. After the Eighteenth Amendment, health, education and most local services fall within their domain. They must be held accountable for results, not for budget announcements. A province should be judged by how many children learn to read, how many mothers survive childbirth and how many homes have clean water, not by how much it claims to have allocated.
The UNDP’s report describes a global crisis, with 1.2 billion people living in multidimensional poverty worldwide. But Pakistan’s especially poor performance demands a national response of its own. The country cannot keep treating poverty reduction as a secondary benefit that will arrive someday, after stabilisation has done its work.
The government’s economic team has spent a great deal of time explaining why the numbers point to recovery. It must now explain why so many Pakistanis still cannot feel it.
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