Daily Times

Jeffery Sacks’ book The End of Poverty is worth the read. He writes, “Currently, more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive.” There are two kinds of poverties.

First is self-created either by wilful ignorance and intentional oversight or to suit particular interests of the powerful lobbies – the political rulers and the bureaucracies. The second type occurs due to natural causes and geographical locations. The first type suits a particular class of people in the society and government policies are formulated to suit its interests. Pakistan falls in the first category.

Two most serious issues highlighted a number of times in these pages and in discussions are overpopulation and low literacy level. The two form a lethal combination. How can the poverty level exceeding 40 percent reduce when apparently no effort at the government level is being made to eradicate the two galloping social evils. It’s well known that 26 million children don’t attend schools. Visit the villages in the rural areas, you find throngs of children aimlessly roaming about. Many of them are usually seen chasing the cattle.

I recently visited Dist Dera Ghazi Khan and some of its villages and found crowds of citizens of all ages sitting and gossiping. What I noticed was low literacy level and overpopulation. Especially the women folks are mostly illiterate and have a large number of children. It reminded me of an interesting observation in Jeffery Sach’s book on how nations like Bangladesh have controlled its population thereby improving the literacy rate and reducing poverty.

Take immediate measures to control the population and arrange millions of out-of-school children to get admitted to schools.

Mr Sach and his associate Dr. Allan Rosenfield, dean of Columbia University’s School of Public Health and one of the world’s leading experts on reproductive health, visited Bangladesh on a study tour some years ago. Both had common interests in a way that Sach wanted to check the poverty and literacy levels and Rosenfield was interested in population growth and its health. Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee is an international development organisation founded in Bangladesh in 1972. It partners with over 100 million people living with inequality and poverty to create opportunities to realise human potential.

BRAC arranged a group of more than fifty married women to be questioned by Dr Rosenfield. He asked the women how many had five children, no hands went up. Four? Still no hands. Three? One woman nervously looking around reluctantly raised her hand up. Two? About 40 percent of the women responded by raising their hands up in the air. One? Perhaps another 25 percent. None? The rest of the women. This average number of children for the participating mothers was one and two children.

Compare the population growth in Bangladesh with Pakistan. For instance, in Niazbeg village, Lahore, some Pashtun families have about a dozen children each. Similarly, many poor families living in makeshift arrangements of small dilapidated tents have ten to twelve children. The women living in these tents do the household jobs in nearby residential colonies. Educating their children is almost unthinkable. One fails to understand why the governments in the past, including the present one, haven’t formed strict policies to control population? As a result, the country is counted as the fifth most populous in the world. Is it something to be proud of?

Is talking about population control at the government level an embarrassing subject? The first step the government has to take is to take the religious leaders of various sects into confidence, as Bangladesh did.

Were Jeffery Sach to advise the Pakistan government to control poverty in the country, his four main suggestions in order of priority would be as followed.

First, take immediate measures to control the population and arrange millions of out-of-school children to get admitted to schools.

Second, denationalise the loss-making parasitic organisations in the public sector at whatever the price. It beats the common sense why various governments in the past wasted public taxes to keep black holes like the PIA, Pakistan Steel Mills and many SMEs running in huge losses. As reported in English daily, the loss-makers dented the government by Rs4 trillion in the last five years.

Third, slash the bureaucracy to half. It won’t make any difference in running the government administration, as the saying goes: small government rules best. The government must cut its running expenses and unnecessary official protocols, which the public abhors.

Austerity must be observed in the official working style and also by avoiding the use of expensive vehicles for movement.

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