Slow to learn

Slow-learning Pakistan is going to be repeatedly struck by disasters that are essentially the same every time.


Editorial September 20, 2014

If Pakistan were to be assessed by an educational psychologist he or she may conclude that as a nation it was a slow learner. ‘Slow learner’ describes students that have the ability to learn, but do so at a rate and depth that is below the average of their peers of the same age. They need more time, frequent repetition and more resources from their teachers to be successful. Their reasoning skills are delayed making new concepts difficult to grasp, and they may have an impairment of perceptions of self worth, as well as presenting behaviours that are ‘acting out’ and a form of denial. There is also a tendency to repeat the same mistakes, and the floods of 2014 and the collective response to them at the federal and provincial level conforms broadly to the slow learner model outlined above.



Over the last five years Pakistan has suffered a succession of weather events which in and of themselves were not necessarily ‘extreme’, but which for a complex nexus of reasons had extreme consequences. All are associated with an annual event — the monsoon — and all involved large bodies of water moving down the Indus River system in both India and Pakistan. All have produced catastrophic floods whose effects are now cumulative, with ample empirical evidence that communities are taking longer to recover each time they are inundated, poverty indicators rise as does food insecurity, and homes destroyed are not replaced on a ‘build back better’ basis where they are replaced at all. The cycle of flooding is not going to abate and is going to continue year-on-year, and in all likelihood worsen as the effects of global warming begin to massively affect the countries of the subcontinent.

The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), based in Islamabad, has recently looked in detail at events that occurred in the floods of 2010. Officials both federal and provincial opined that ‘poor planning’ lay behind much of the dysfunctionality and bad decision-making which magnified rather than mitigated the effects of the flood. There was insufficient temporary shelter with families waiting days under open skies before getting any relief. When the IDPs eventually returned to their homes or what was left of them and approached local NGOs and government departments, they found there was minimal coordination between the public and private sectors with the consequence that many fell through the gaps in service provision. Humanitarian services in some places were ‘influenced’ by major landowners, causing some NGOs to decide to withdraw. Disaster management committees that had Plan A and a backup Plan B, found themselves undercut when ‘higher authorities’ imposed Plan C — for which they were unprepared.

Despite the floods Pakistan is rapidly becoming a water-poor nation, and responses to both flooding and water management generally tend to be reactionary and tokenistic, driven by short-term political expediency rather than the joined-up thinking so desperately needed. The dams that should have been built were not; the ones that were built are poorly maintained. The challenges presented by climate change are cross-generational and transcend cycles of electoral governance. Slow-learning Pakistan is going to be repeatedly struck by disasters that are essentially the same every time, only varying in magnitude.

Earthquakes are unpredictable, the monsoon and its effects entirely predictable and with considerable accuracy, and the response to them can and should be better than it is. Services such as Rescue 1122 which is now well established in Punjab need to be rolled out and appropriately equipped and trained nationally. The National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) in response to the 2010 floods issued in 2013 a National Disaster Risk Reduction Policy that details how to respond to future extreme events by reducing the risks associated with them, and is an excellent building block in what needs to be a much larger planning and implementation process. Slow learners do — eventually — learn, but it can be a painful process for all concerned.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 21st, 2014.

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COMMENTS (1)

AVPMPolpot | 9 years ago | Reply

" Slow-learning Pakistan is going to be repeatedly struck by disasters that are essentially the same every time, only varying in magnitude." ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sir u remind me of words attributed to Einstein " Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different results every time." Is there a mental asylum for countries?

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