Hassanwazir's List: pakistan domestic problems

• Fifty-nine per cent of all Pakistanis are below the age of 24, and the under-30 tally of the population is a whopping 67.1 per cent. We are a young country, why shouldn’t we have young representatives?
• Youth surveys conducted in 2009 (by the British Council, Herald magazine and the Centre for Civic Education) revealed the extent to which Pakistan’s youngsters are disappointed in their political system and elite. Nearly half the youth do not vote, 40 per cent have no confidence in the utility of their vote, 78 per cent actively reject politics and less than 10 per cent support government institutions. More to the point, less than one per cent considers active political participation as a desirable goal.

• After all, I argued, if the country’s population has risen from 40 million in 1950 to some 190 million now — a nearly five-fold increase — water availability has obviously not gone up by the same rate
• Also, the urbanisation rate has been even higher than the overall rate of population increase, especially in Karachi
• 42 per cent of all Pakistanis are below 14 years old, and therefore not contributing to the economy, unless they are forced to work. We are adding between four and five million to our numbers every year at the rate of around eight babies a minute.
• By 2020, there will be 300 million happy Pakistanis, most of them going on to make yet more babies. At 30 per cent, Pakistan has the lowest use of contraception in South Asia. Some of these statistics emerged during a recent conference in Karachi to mark the World Population Day, and make sobering reading.
• In the UK, there are now voices being raised for placing population at the heart of efforts to help developing countries. Some politicians have questioned the effectiveness of aid when the recipients are breeding away, thereby diluting the impact of foreign assistance. The ongoing famines and droughts in parts of Africa can be attributed to rapidly growing populations, and the resulting deforestation and desertification caused by intensive farming and grazing.

3 more annotations...

• Now, an event which leads to or is immediately responsible for causing a result is known as its ‘proximate cause’, in contradistinction to a higher-level ‘ultimate cause’ recognised as the ‘real’ reason something has occurred. For example: why did the building collapse? Proximate cause: because the foundations slipped sideways. Ultimate cause: because the adjacent plot was deeply excavated without shoring/supporting the earth around its foundations.

  Generally, an ultimate cause may itself be a proximate cause for a second ultimate cause. In the above example: why was the adjacent plot deeply excavated without shoring/supporting the earth around its foundations? Proximate cause: because construction regulations were violated. Ultimate cause: because the government is corrupt and is making money on illegal and dangerous structures by looking the other way.

• The foremost ultimate cause of the chaos we face in Pakistan today: overpopulation.

  In 1947, the population of Pakistan (the west wing) was 31 million; in 64 years this has ballooned to 186 million, and is expected to further escalate to 266 million by 2030. In 1947, the respective populations of UK, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea were 49, 41, 68, 78 and 20 million; today they are 62, 63, 82, 127 and 49 million. In 2030, they are projected to be 68, 66, 78, 117 and 49 million.
• In 1970, the populations of West Pakistan and then East Pakistan were 62 (47 per cent) and 70 million (53 per cent). The Awami League in East Pakistan won 160 (53.3 per cent) of the 300 National Assembly seats in that year’s election and, under the ‘udher tum, idher hum’ policy of West Pakistanis

• Michael Kugelman of the Asia Programme at the Woodrow Wilson Centre recently wrote: “As reported in the Wilson Centre’s recent book on Pakistan’s population challenges, though Pakistan’s fertility rate is in decline, it is falling at a considerably slower pace than that of its neighbours, and the rate of decrease has slowed considerably over the last decade. The country’s total fertility rate (TFR) today is just under four, considerably above the replacement level rate (2.1).

  “By many indications, Pakistan’s TFR does not figure to fall quickly anytime soon. Pakistan’s maternal and reproductive health sector is deeply troubled, with family planning services either of poor quality or nonexistent — particularly in rural areas.

  Many rural women are obliged to travel on average 50 to 100km to obtain such services. Meanwhile, the status of Pakistani women is dreadful; female literacy is estimated to stand at only 44 per cent (some place it as low as 35 per cent), while women’s labour participation rates barely approach 20 per cent. Not surprisingly, Pakistan’s contraceptive prevalence rate is quite low (30 per cent), while its rate of unmet need for family planning is high (25 per cent).

2 more annotations...

• French sociologist Émile Durkheim had it that densely populated areas and their inhabitants would be exposed to increased conflict between individuals and higher crime rates, and they would experience more breakdown or change in social order, i.e. large numbers of people cannot coexist amicably in small areas, thus leading to inner-city conflict, urban poverty, fighting over scarce resources, and the like.

• He left in his wake a cult of militancy and violence and demonstrated how simple it is to drown this country in a
  swamp of religiosity.
• Pervez Musharraf had politically suicidal tendencies, and we now wallow in the horrible mess he left behind.
• One eminently factual remark made by Musharraf to the BBC in December 1999 says it all so simply. When asked whether the military was as corrupt as the civil politicians his straightforward, honest response was “We are all of the same stock.”
• His henchmen, the major handful, the Rehman Maliks and Monticello Doctors, and the rest are regarded by the national omnibus riders as mere leeches who do his every bidding.

2 more annotations...

• Surprisingly, the total energy produced in the country has actually decreased nearly 10 per cent between 2007 and 2010.
  This is primarily due to lower-capacity utilisation, which in turn has been the result of ‘circular debt’, a concept that has been bandied around freely over the past few years as the primary problem that besets energy production in Pakistan.
• The two most glaring reasons behind the present mess Pakistan finds itself in are the 1994 energy policy and the resultant extreme over-reliance on expensive imported fuel mix.
• highly generous 1994 power policy for independent power producers (IPP). At that time the country’s electricity generation relied on a fuel mix of approximately 70:30 in favour of hydro versus thermal. This changed dramatically over the next decade with the fuel mix going to 30 per cent hydro and almost 70 per cent thermal by the end of 2010.
• As per the National Power System Expansion Plan 2010-2030, as of 2010, Wapda (employing hydro production) generated electricity at Rs1.03/kWh ((1.2 cents/kWh) while public-sector thermal power plants provided the same at Rs8.5/kWh (10 cents/kwh)
• However, the IPPs (primarily thermal) provided the same at Rs9.58/kWh (11.2 cents/kWh). As a result, the average blended cost of generation was Rs6.6/kWh (7.7 cents/kWh) in 2010 which further increased to Rs9.81/kWh (11.5 cents/kWh) for the end consumer due to line losses and theft in the transmission and distribution systems.
• Most new thermal IPPs are charging in the range of 15-18 cents/kWh at current oil prices.
• The estimated cost of energy stands at 1.6 cents/kWh for Kalabagh dam with a vast majority of new hydros expected to come under 4.5 cents/kWh as per a recent NTDC (National Transmission and Despatch Company) report
• Furthermore, the country has so far completely failed to develop its coal reserves (only 30MW coming from coal) which are estimated at 175 billion tonnes (the second largest in the world). Engro estimates a tariff of 10-12 cents/kWh for Thar coal-based power production based on the current policy. Incredibly, the world average for coal-based power production in the energy mix is 40 per cent while it is only 0.1 per cent in Pakistan.
• To make matters worse, many of the thermal IPPs set-ups under both the 1994 and 2002 power policy are of inefficient design (single cycle rather than more efficient combined cycle) since these policies provided cost plus equity return of 15 per cent irrespective of the efficiency of the technology/fuel source being used in the power plant.
• Circular debt is a red herring. The core problem lies in wrong policy choices made in the early 1990s that have continued since then

8 more annotations...

• IN Pakistan’s scenario, where approximately two-thirds of the people live in rural areas, rural poverty is a major destabilising factor
• Nearly 67 per cent of Pakistan’s households are landless
• The official notification points out that nearly 67 per cent of households owned no land at the time this study came out; 18.25 per cent households owned less than five acres of land; and 9.66 per cent owned between five and 12.5 acres, sufficient only to provide meagre levels of existence for sometimes large extended families that tend to rely on land as the sole source of income. The pattern is dismally skewed towards a few feudal families in possession of large land holdings; barely one per cent (0.64 per cent plus 0.37 per cent) of households owned over 35 acres.
• trikingly, poverty levels tend to decrease in inverse proportion to land-holdings, with poverty virtually disappearing with holdings of 55 acres and above
• n terms of the spatial distribution of landlessness, 86 per cent of the households in Sindh were landless (landless plus non-agricultural), followed by 78 per cent in Balochistan and 74 per cent in Punjab.
• It is estimated that in 1998-99, 30.6 per cent of Pakistanis were living below the poverty line. The estimate stands at 23.9 per cent in the period 2004-5, and according to official projections, dropped to 22.3 per cent by 2005-6. Rural poverty was estimated at 27 per cent in 2005-06, unfavourably comparing with an urban incidence of 13.1 per cent.
• The official surveys have, however, been criticised on the grounds of faulty methodologies and the padding of results. A World Bank survey put the figures of poverty incidence in Pakistan at 28.3 per cent in 2004-05, with income distribution patterns utilising the Gini coefficient yielding a figure of 0.3 in 2005-06 as compared to 0.27 in 2001-02. This indicates that there is a skewed income distribution pattern in favour of the high earners, which negates the gains made in the eradication of absolute poverty by increasing income inequality. The overall poverty incidence was highest in Balochistan, with almost half the population living below the poverty line, with minimal difference between the poverty incidence in Sindh and Khyber
  Pakhtunkhwa.
• Punjab fared the best, with an overall poverty incidence of 26 per cent and, anomalously, a rural poverty incidence of just 24 per cent. This also implies that rural poverty was lower than average in both Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, which seems to militate against conventional wisdom and other studies.

6 more annotations...

• Poverty persists in the developing regions; the gap between the haves and the have-nots has in fact widened in the wake of globalisation over the last two decades. Despite substantial growth in GDP, those on the lower economic rungs in these nations (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and many countries of Africa and South America) have seen their lifestyle parameters worsen.
• Maternal mortality is still unacceptably high in these regions (the Asian subcontinent accounts for a quarter of global maternal deaths).
• A candid answer to that question can be found in a new publication, titled So Much Aid, So Little Development written by Samia Waheed Altaf, a Pakistani specialist in public health who was a member of an international team that oversaw the Social Action Programme (SAP) in Pakistan during the 1990s
• She has observed and chronicled the way decisions are made, in disbursing aid from multilateral agencies.

  • CHRONICLE:
    Record (a related series of events) in a factual and detailed way- his work chronicles 20th-century displacement and migration
• As for awareness, the lowliest among illiterate villagers knows of course, that it is inadvisable to drink polluted water — but what options do they have, when the factory set up (in the name of development) discharges toxic effluents into the river that is the source of water for the community? Or when water bodies dry up?
• Pregnant women do not deliver their babies at the hospital, not because they are ignorant but because they do not have the money to get to the nearest hospital, or there are no roads connecting the village to the city, or for a dozen other reasons.
• Women have multiple pregnancies not because they do not know any better, but because of son preference, which has nothing to do with foreign aid but decides how effective a project for limiting families will be
• The western ‘consultant’ who wonders why a woman does not walk out of a marriage where she is not permitted to go out and get involved in community work, is no different from the infamous French queen who wondered why the poor protesting about lack of bread could not eat cake.
• The foreign experts stay at five-star hotels, hire air-conditioned cars and go shopping for exotic handicrafts to take back as ‘bargain buys’. Nearly 40 per cent of aid money goes back to the donor countries, as consultants’ fees (one of the conditions governing aid is that consultants from the donor country should be hired) and incidental expenses (hiring a fleet of vehicles, staff, field helpers, interpreters, meetings, daily or deputation allowances, publishing a glossy report with a liberal sprinkling of appropriate buzz words and highfalutin phrases). The human dimension gets completely ignored, in the pursuit of paper projections and academic analyses

7 more annotations...