KARACHI:
Pakistan lost more than 727,000 workers to overseas employment in 2024. Before November 2025 arrived, another 687,000 had registered to go. The two-year total is nearing 1.5 million. These were not people chasing adventure. They were engineers, doctors, IT professionals who built their careers in Pakistani classrooms and hospitals and then made a straightforward calculation about where those careers had a future. That calculation is still being made. People are still leaving.
The government tends to respond to this with remittance figures. At $38.5 billion in 2024-25, those figures are genuinely significant. But the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics estimates that brain drain costs the economy $4.2 billion annually in depleted output, weakened public institutions and critical sectors that have lost the professionals they need to function. Money sent home sustains households. It does not replace the doctors who left public hospitals or the engineers who are no longer here to build anything.
What deserves more attention is the situation facing those who chose to stay. Between 80 and 95 per cent of private industrial units operate below the minimum wage threshold. Hiring through multiple contractor layers is standard practice, keeping workers in a permanent state of insecurity with no benefits and no upward path. In most workplaces the unspoken arrangement is that one employee covers what three should handle, at a fraction of what any of them should earn. Pushing back on this is career-ending. The supply of people willing to accept the same terms is effectively unlimited.
The problem runs across every sector – manufacturing, services, healthcare and education. Stable employment increasingly depends on who you know rather than what you can do. For everyone else the options narrow quickly.
Pakistan needs between 25 and 30 million new jobs over the next decade to absorb a growing young workforce. That target gets mentioned and then moves to the background. What receives even less attention is the condition of the jobs that already exist. A labour market built on low pay, insecurity and relentless pressure does not retain talent. It produces the numbers that show up in emigration statistics. And those numbers are still climbing.
Maheen Zahra
Lahore
