Youth seek greener pastures overseas

More than 400,000 highly-qualified young Pakistanis went abroad in a desperate search of employment during the first six months of the current year, official data revealed on Thursday.

The phenomenon of seeking employment called the ‘brain drain’ has been persisting for past many years. The data said that in the last five years, a whopping 2.75 million youth left the country.

Experts attribute the brain drain to uncertain economic conditions, rising inflation and unemployment. They suggest that this phenomenon was not restricted to any one or a particular region of the country.

According to the official document, a copy of which is available with The Express Tribune, more than 1.2 young people went overseas for employment during the tenure of the current coalition government.

According to the data, 832,000 people went abroad, while over 400,000 left the country in the first 6 months of this year for employment in 40 different sectors. They included highly-educated and highly-trained youngsters.

A further break down of the data showed that those who left the country in the last one-and-a-half-year period included 11,000 accountants, 11,000 engineers, 4,000 doctors, 34,000 technicians, and 37,500 managers.

Other included 4,000 nurses, 1,560 teachers, 29,000 electricians, 13,445 computer typists, 8,000 agricultural experts 15,000 computer operators, 24,000 supervisors and more than 1600 draftsmen.

In search of better employment during that period, most of the Pakistani youth went to the Arab countries, including 700,000 to Saudi Arabia, 229,000 to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), 111,000 to Oman and 90,000 to Qatar.

Outside the Middle Eastern region, According to the statistics, 8,000 Pakistanis went to Great Britain, more than 1,300 to the United States, more than 20,000 to Malaysia, 3,000 to Greece and more than 6,000 to Romania.

According to the document, during the last year and a half, 683,000 youth were from Punjab, 324,000 from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 90,000 from Sindh, 12,000 from Balochistan, 44,000 from Azad Jammu and Kashmir and 11,000 from Islamabad.

The official data revealed that the 382,000 went abroad in 2018, 625,000 in 2019, 225,000 in 2020 and 288,000 in 2021. Among those who left Pakistan, included 200,000 highly-educated and over 400,000 highly-trained youth.