Daily Times

The elections planned for February 8 lack the usual lustre, mass rallies, flag-bearing marches, and fervour typical of such an occasion. During the campaign speeches, politicians in the run make big promises to fascinate the crowd and win their votes. Most of these promises are almost impossible to keep.

For instance, as an election manifesto, the PPP’s chairman Bilawal Bhutto promises to ‘double’ salaries of lower classes, build three million homes and provide 300 units of free electricity. It reminds me of Imran Niazi’s braggart who during his election campaign of 2018 had promised to build 5 million homes for the homeless. He even wanted to bulldoze the governor’s house to convert it into a teaching institution. He ended up with nothing to show for his performance in nearly four years as the prime minister.

There’s a colossal difference between what the politicians promise to gain power and the economic situation that exists in reality. Our country’s sagging economy is the main problem for any government to handle. Simply put, we live beyond our means. The bureaucracy is too big in size compared with the workload it has to manage.

There’s a colossal difference between what the politicians promise to gain power and the economic situation that exists in reality.

Mian Muhammad Mansha, the famous businessman in the country, said, “Two-third of our bureaucracy has no work to do.” He’s a business magnate and knows how to conceive and establish projects and run them profitably. His industrial units and commercial organisations employ thousands of people. Mansha’s observation about the bureaucracy couldn’t be wrong.

Instead of reducing its size, every government that comes to power creates more departments and inducts dozens of ministers, ministers of state and advisers. Invariably the hopeful ministers and parliamentarians would have promised their electorate to give them government jobs when elected. Whether these jobs were to be productive or unproductive is another matter. Thus the prime ministerial cabinet is much larger in size than required and so is the bureaucracy. Both pat each other’s backs since they live on public taxes and foreign loans.

In some cases, it seems as if our country is floating on the oil and gas deposits to afford luxuries. For instance, a senior judge on retirement goes home with a pension of nearly a million rupees and other perks and facilities. Nobody seems to care about such a luxurious handshake that would leave many stomachs empty at the lower rung of society.

The society stands drastically divided between upper and lower classes. The gap between the two is increasing because the population is multiplying in geometrical progression. The main problem is that the lower class of society expands prodigiously while the educated upper-class contents itself with two or three children. No wonder then Pakistan has become the fifth most populous country in the world. With the country’s population increasing at such a high rate, there’s hardly any hope of the poverty line coming down nor any improvement expected in the living standard of the poor of the land.

It’s in place to compare the populations of two parts of the same country – West and East Pakistan in 1970. West Pakistan’s population, according to the 1970 census was 58 million and the eastern part, now Bangladesh, was 65 million. The census of 2021 announced Pakistan’s population at 231.4 million and Bangladesh’s at 169.4 million. How Bangladesh manage to control its population should be a lesson to learn from.

The most tragic part of our politics is that no political or uniformed leader had the courage or the foresight to take up the subject of overpopulation in the country as a serious issue. Why? Is it sinful to talk about the exploding population growth? I think most of these leaders hesitated lest they upset the men who lead religious parties in the country. One recalls there was a population planning department. Its women staff members visited families to guide them on how to control the population. The newspapers carried large advertisements to promote population plans and so did the government-owned TV. But not any more!

In the absence of any government effort whatsoever to control the population, villages have turned into towns and towns into cities. Exodus to big cities to look for jobs is a common practice and creates problems. Instead of distributing poverty fairly by taxing the rich and spending on the poor, the opposite holds true. As reported by this paper, 26 million children don’t attend schools, which must be a matter of great concern for any government of the welfare state.

The writer is a Lahore-based columnist and can be reached at pinecity@gmail.com