A recent presentation by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) to the Senate Standing Committee on Planning and Development, about unemployment levels in the country’s educated youth, revealed some hair-raising statistics that ought to be enough to shake the government out of its slumber. It turns out that not only is the real unemployment figure most likely much higher than the government’s claim of 6.5 percent – PIDE reckons it is around 16 percent – but also that 24 percent of educated people, meaning in this case those with under-graduate and graduate degrees, are jobless at the moment. It also presented some disturbing trends to back its argument, like the fact that a recent position for peon, announced by a high court, drew 1.5 million applications, including MPhil degree holders. And it doesn’t speak too well of the education ministry that when the committee chairman sought statistics about educated youth and children in the country, he was told that there was no official research on the subject at the government level, and what little was being carried out was sanctioned, funded, and conducted from abroad. This means that the government has chosen to stay in the dark about something as crucial as educated people lining up for menial work just to make ends meet. And with the hangover of the pandemic likely to persist for a while, there is little to suggest that things are going to get better anytime soon. This puts the country in a very serious dilemma and at least begins to explain the feverish brain drain that Pakistan has been suffering from for a long time. When good minds with decent education are excluded from the job market, and forced to seek greener pastures elsewhere, then both the country’s economy and its security stand to suffer. Hopefully this report will cause a very serious rethink in Islamabad and make the education ministry a lot more proactive, especially in terms of research, than it is used to being. *