Missed targets

It is not that Pakistan is a failed state, contrary to popular myth, but it is a state that has consistently failed to help itself. The cumulative effects of the failure to reach a range of goals add up to an institutionalised inadequacy that ensures our position at the back of any line of developing nations. Pakistan is not going to meet six out of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and our population is growing at an unsustainable rate. Coupled together, these form a picture of a state that has too many people, too few jobs, suffers from chronically poor health and demonstrates an inability or unwillingness to act decisively in respect of the blindingly obvious. The 2013 MDG report reveals poor performance in respect of poverty, primary education, the empowerment of women, child health and combating common diseases. Two other states in our neighbourhood, Nepal and Sri Lanka, both of which have experienced either civil war or major social unrest in the recent past, have performed significantly better than Pakistan and should provide a ‘South-South’ learning model, but have apparently not in Pakistan.



The UN Assistant Secretary General and the UNDP Director for South Asia in presenting the 2013 MDG report pointed to the mechanisms for MDG achievement — social policy is equally important as economic, an investment in women has multiple benefits across all MDGs, and spending in health and education sectors likewise. Although Pakistan has made improvements in some areas, these are endangered by our galloping population explosion. Coincidentally, on the same day that the MDG report was released so was the third Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) 2012-13. The population increase is unsustainable even though the rate has decreased from 4.1 per cent in 2007 to 3.8 per cent in 2012, and although we have made advances, we still lag way behind others in the region in exactly the same way as we trail in the MDG race. It is not that there is no progress, but there is not enough to reach goals that define our future — success or forever stuck in the slough of mediocrity.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 24^th,  2014.

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