Manufacturing poverty
The writer is an Occupational Health & Safety professional also engaged in writing and advocacy on social issues. He can be reached at naeemsadiq@gmail.com and tweets @saynotoweapons
Poverty is neither ordained nor an in-built characteristic of nature. It is an artificially and cruelly fabricated curse to enable the rich to extract disproportionate benefits for themselves. Millions of Pakistanis lead a miserable life of extreme poverty, inequality and indignity, not by accident or default but by a willfully designed set of immoral and tyrannical measures. This article aims to examine how Pakistan succeeded in manufacturing poverty on such a large scale.
Poverty manufacturing begins with a runaway population. A country refusing to address its suicidal Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 3.6 is guilty of deliberately generating poverty. We learnt nothing from China, Bangladesh, India or scores of other countries who reduced their TFR to less than 2. Massive focus on controlling its burgeoning population ought to be the first poverty reduction task for Pakistan.
Poverty is manufactured by deliberately defining an abysmal minimum wage that is small enough to make a family live on the boundary wall of a graveyard. The state further adds fuel to the fire by ensuring that even this miserable minimum wage is denied to more than half of the workforce. A dysfunctional EOBI organisation performs the next step of the poverty manufacturing process. It is a white elephant that consumes more than Rs1.2 billion on its own maintenance every year but has registered barely 9 million workers out of a total of 90 million formal and informal workers of Pakistan. Thus we make beggars out of millions who retire without entitlement to any pension.
Poverty creation is often pioneered by the state itself. This happens when it does not pay minimum wage to its own contract staff working in its own municipalities, cantonment boards, government hospitals, water and sewage agencies and solid waste management boards. The state is also guilty of looking the other way while its predatory elite exploits millions of workers with criminally low wages. Private security guards and the staff at petrol pumps are two such reprehensible examples of cruelty.
The inequality gap is further widened when the state unabashedly pampers its rich parasite class by incentives, subsidies and tax rebates. This self-obsessed class lives a life of obscene luxury, travels in ostentatious vehicles, consumes Australian Weetabix, and uses imported flowers for its extravagant weddings. It is not surprising that of the $35 billion borrowed over the last three years, $8 billion were spent for import of cars, SUVs, mobile phones and luxury goods. It is the same overindulged class for whom Rs280 billion loans have been written off in the last 35 years.
Poverty is multiplied by a complex and decadent tax system that enables just about 2 per cent population to pay tax, thus keeping Pakistan trapped in a debt cycle. FBR refuses to make a simple one-page tax return that could bring 100 per cent citizens within the tax net. On the contrary it has devised numerous escape routes to enable non-filers to avail or buy all facilities by paying a token surcharge. Wealth tax is not imposed lest it offends the rich or reduces the inequality.
Pakistan ought to raise the minimum wage to Rs52771, estimated as the living income by Anker Research Institute in its 2021 Report for Pakistan. Pakistan will progress when its 95 per cent people have ‘beyond the morsel income’ to buy essential household products of daily life. Pakistan will progress when these products are locally manufactured instead of being mindlessly imported. Pakistan will progress when every worker, formal or informal, regardless of the nature of work or employment, is registered under EOBI and issued a health card. Pakistan will progress when parasites like EOBI and Labour Departments are replaced by NADRA-linked digital databases to monitor the wage and EOBI of every citizen having a CNIC. Poverty elimination must begin from the bottom – starting from those who enter the sewage gutters to clear the choked excreta with their bare hands.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 25th, 2021.
Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.