Mother State
HR Ahmad is a Professor of Physiology at AKU
Mother State of Pakistan seems to be unable to provide basic health and education to all her children of the republic. Thus, the responsibility has been shifted to wealth-owning citizens of Pakistan. A new history popcorned in Phase II of Pakistan in the form of commercialisation of health and education, making the society more asymmetrical. Thus, the children’s performance in the school became dependent on their parents’ income. The pillars of this asymmetrical society are based on: 1) Infant malnutrition; 2) Consanguinity; and 3) Poverty. This fact is evidenced by poor health indices of Pakistan in terms of infant mortality rate, under-five years mortality rate, maternal mortality, birth rate, death rate, population growth rate, life expectancy and human development index. Application of partial differential equations would show further disparity between rural and urban and within the compartments of this society.
The questions are to be posed as to how the Ministries of Health and Education could be activated and energised with the support of HEC and PMDC to study the bank of contraindications being collected over the period of 75 years of Pakistan within two phases: Phase I ‘1947 – 1970’ and Phase II ‘1980 – 2023’.
Extraordinary events in Pakistan have generated contradictions in abundance. Institutes of Contradictions should be established to study and analyse contradictions to open the door to the synthesis-based solutions for public health and education paradigms’ shift against the challenges of elite capture, war activity and ripples of globalisation in the form of marketing import technology.
The Ministry of Health and PMDC could design a new public health system covering both rural and urban areas. MBBS should be of six years’ duration, including house job training. It means the final examination should be after absolving the house job training in both rural and urban settings throughout the four provinces. This design might be an extra benefit in reducing the high load of consanguinity. GP system of erstwhile Part I Pakistan should be reintroduced to stress upon prevention of disease. This would be useful for children and senior citizens, especially with a vector on the physician home visit. Each public hospital should have a network of a GP System as a screening clinic for referral to the hospital.
The Public Health System under the surveillance of the Ministry of Health should consider both political and biological treatment of disease. The health indices of Pakistan should be the mirror of good surveillance of public health in Pakistan as proposed by Zaki Hasan in Challenges of Public Health in Pakistan.
The Ministry of Education and HEC could design a new public education system covering both rural and urban areas to make children’s performance in schools independent of parents’ income to be on a par with nation states of the world. Currently, we are divided and adapted to Elite-Public School System with primarily a job-seeking curriculum instead of conceiving a civil society to enjoy remaining human being and only this. Good higher education should be based on egalitarian primary education to be able to unfold the creative energy of children as seeds of a nation becoming human capital for the Mother State. The Programme Project Research should be focused on indigenous questions and indigenous resources to nurture natural and social scientists to conceive a civil society to achieve a secular democratic nation state, finally enabling a Union of South Asia.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 1st, 2024.
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