Fortunes and famines

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In the sweeping and storm-laden saga of Pakistan's economic journey, the curtain has risen upon a harrowing truth, the chasm between the affluent and the forsaken has widened to grotesque proportions. This is no happenstance of fate, but the malignant fruit of decades-long policy rot, where the republic's promise of justice has been quietly auctioned to privilege.

Today, the richest 1% command more wealth than the bottom 70% combined, while the top 10% hoard over 40% of income, leaving the bottom forty to survive on a meagre 10%. Beneath glittering towers and fortified mansions lie the shadows of despair, millions condemned to lives of scarcity and indignity, with nearly 40% of the population now plunged beneath the poverty line.

In these forsaken quarters, millions forage not for prosperity, but for survival. Nearly two out of every five Pakistanis now languish beneath the poverty line, a staggering indictment of a state that has forsaken its solemn covenant with its people.

At the heart of this injustice lies Pakistan's tax regime – a perverse machinery that strikes the poor with invisible whips of indirect taxation while shielding the rich behind veils of exemptions. Essentials are taxed, while agricultural wealth, capital gains and landed assets glide past scrutiny. Only 2% of the population files income tax, exposing both the rot of non-compliance and the state's docile submission to elite interests. The architecture is cruelly elegant: penalise survival, reward accumulation, and cloak it all in the solemn rhetoric of fairness.

Worse still is the withering of public service, the silent decay of education and healthcare. Schools meant to uplift have become hollow halls, abandoned by both educators and investment, while private institutions flourish as citadels of exclusion. Hospitals tell a tale of two nations: private clinics for the well-heeled and crumbling government wards for the rest.

The United Nations Development Programme reports that a child born to affluence in Pakistan may live fifteen years longer than one born in poverty – a fact that should shame any conscience, were it still awake. If that does not stir the national soul, what shall?

Meanwhile, youth unemployment has soared beyond 20%, striking hardest in rural belts. Yet while despair metastasises among the young, the state turns not to them but to the corporate elite, granting tax reliefs, subsidies, and bailouts without strings. Inflation has ravaged household incomes, pushing once-proud families into hunger and humiliation.

What sustains this house of inequity is not accident, but design, the unholy marriage of wealth and power. The economic elite do not merely influence the rules; they write them. Laws bend to the will of the few, while corruption blooms unchecked. Patronage eclipses merit. Institutions, once guardians of the public good, now crumble as silent accomplices to the capture of state sovereignty.

To redeem the republic from this descent into despair, Government must summon a rare and formidable will. The tax system must be overhauled to reflect the principles of equity, stripping away elite exemptions and compelling the wealthy to shoulder their due burden. Public health and education must be revived not as luxuries for the few, but as entitlements for all.

Real employment must rise through serious investment in small and medium enterprises, not grand spectacles. Land reforms must be pursued, rural credit expanded, and the nation's covenant with its poor rewritten.

For in a land where palaces rise beside slums, and feasts unfold beside famine, justice ceases to be sacred, it becomes satire. This is no longer merely an economic dilemma; it is a moral fracture. And if allowed to fester, it may one day tear the soul of nation beyond redemption.