State of rural poverty in Pakistan

80pc of Pakistan’s poor live in rural areas with the rural-urban poverty gap being much worse in Southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan, according to a recent World Bank report. The report said that the poverty head count rate in rural Pakistan was twice as much in urban areas — 36pc versus 18pc. Rural households, it said, faced a substantial disadvantage in virtually all aspects of service delivery. Nationally, the village’s net enrolment rate was 13 percentage points lower for primary school and 11 percentage points lower for middle school than in urban areas.

Moreover, rural children are 8.5 percentage points less likely than urban children to have adequate immunization by three years of age, and rural women are 10 percentage points less likely to receive prenatal care, 28 percentage points less likely to give birth in a facility or hospital, and 12 percentage points less likely to receive postnatal care.

For a country having more than 50pc of its total population residing in non-urban settlements, these are worrisome figures. Historically the focus of development has been the large urban areas owing to higher political value with countryside receiving merely a nominal share in development spending. As the above figures show, this is not sustainable, and situation has only worsened in recent years. The sole solution for village populations should not have to be to migrate to big cities but people centric development polices specifically for rural areas should be devised and urgently implemented.

Typical mechanisms will not work owing to unique economic and social characteristics of these areas. The glaring gap between Northern provinces of Punjab and KPK and Southern Sindh and Balochistan is also a cause for concern. For a united and integrated Pakistan, uplift efforts need to be carried out on national level with due regard for equity instead of equality.