Public policy to address backwardness in Punjab

I will take up the issue of public policy in this article vis-a-vis development, backwardness of districts in Punjab.

In this final article on the relative development and backwardness of the administrative districts in the province of Punjab, I will take up the issue of public policy. Following the added responsibilities transferred to the provinces by the Eighteenth Amendment and the promise of the flow of additional resources from the federal to the provincial governments as a consequence of the Seventh Award of the National Finance Commission, the provinces now have larger space available to them to address their problems. For Lahore, regional disparities need to be addressed with considerable seriousness.

As discussed in the earlier articles, those that have been left behind economically and socially are mostly in the south, those that are relatively better off are mainly from the districts in the province’s centre and a couple in the north. Given what we know and what I have discussed before, raises an important issue concerning public policy. What can the provincial government do to close the yawning gap between the province’s backward areas and those that have done well?

A comparison of the overall development ranking of the districts with the three sets of indicators used for this purpose (income and wealth, social development, and development of economic infrastructure) yields a number of interesting results. It should be expected that the top districts would do well in terms of income and wealth. That, surprisingly, is not the case. There is more than a five-point difference between district ranking on the development scale compared with the ranking on the scale of income and wealth for 17 out of the 35 districts. In other words, almost one-half of the districts do well even when their wealth and income indicators are not very high. To take two extreme examples: Gujrat ranks 16^th on the development scale but is 33^rd on the scale of income and wealth. This means that there are factors other than wealth and income that have contributed to the district’s better performance. Long-distance migration that results in large flow of remittances may be one of them.

The other extreme is the district of Bhakkar, which is 22^nd on the development scale but sixth on the income and wealth scale. By and large, the less developed districts in the south do better in terms of income and wealth. This may well be because averages used for wealth and income hide the extremes in their distribution. However, since distribution data are not available at the district level this conclusion will remain in the realm of speculation.

The relative backwardness of the south is largely because of poor social development and poorly-developed economic infrastructure. These, as indicated above, are the other two indicators of overall development used by the Institute of Public Policy in its recent work on Punjab. It is, therefore, in these two areas that public policy needs to focus on to reduce the development gap between the more and less developed districts of the province. In these two broad areas, the provincial government should pay particular attention to four things: education, in particular at the tertiary level; health care; improvement of the irrigation system; and inter-district transport. I will say a few words about each of these four areas of public policy focus.

The need for getting all children educated has long been recognised as an important development objective. It is one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to which Pakistan has subscribed. However, while this MDG is to be met by 2015, Pakistan remains way behind. This is particularly the case for the country’s backward areas, including the less developed districts of Punjab. While the realisation of this goal must receive the attention of all governments, Punjab should give special attention to improving the levels of skills of the youth in the province. A public-private sector partnership should be developed where the government could provide land grants and supporting infrastructure to private operators who have demonstrated their ability to provide quality higher education. These seasoned educational entrepreneurs should be encouraged to establish vocational institutions in the areas where the region could establish new industrial and service sector enterprises.

In the health sector as well, the government, while focusing on providing primary care, could work with private parties to build hospitals in all the less developed districts. These medical establishments should be part of an integrated chain with different district centres specialising in different areas of medical expertise. This way patients will not need to go to the more developed cities in the province to get the medical attention they need.

There is now a realisation that Pakistan has not given as much attention to maintaining and further developing the rich irrigation infrastructure it inherited from the British period. It is a water-scarce country, which needs to properly husband this precious resource. The Punjab government needs to formulate an action plan aimed at providing the neglected infrastructure the maintenance it needs.

Developing a road network linking the districts is the fourth priority for the government’s focus. Such a network is needed so that south Punjab can move towards developing agro-processing industry. The new retail chains that have arrived in the country and set up shop in some of the major cities have indicated that they would be able to increase their processing activity if they can quickly move perishable commodities from the production areas to processing centres.

I will conclude this series of articles with the suggestion that the policymakers operating from Lahore may consider developing a special plan for the development of the backward districts. The plan should be formulated by involving the private sector and by consulting the citizens of the districts. And it should indicate the source of the required funding including the possibility of levying a ‘backward areas development tax’ on consumption in the relatively better-to-do parts of the province.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 4^th, 2012.