Population and the governance meltdown

Certain political pressure groups did not want to take chances with any serious census as it may challenge their hold

You will find many who blame this squarely on the Eighteenth Amendment. And they have good arguments too. That is, if you ignore the reason why the said amendment was introduced. The argument goes like this: there was a reason, it says, that the concurrent list was not abolished. Provinces did not have the capacity to take so much responsibility. Now that they have won their heart’s desire, the added burden of governance is killing them. As I said, it sounds like a fair argument on the face of it. But that is just about it.

We know that the power struggle between the centre and the provinces is an old one. But that is not why the Eighteenth Amendment was introduced. It was meant to cure the Constitution of the injuries inflicted by the Seventeenth Amendment and the bad aftertaste of the two provisional constitutional orders, the legal framework order of 2002 and judgments of the honourable courts that vetted all that. Later it was decided, through consensus, to fulfil the original promise of the framers of the 1973 Constitution to abolish the concurrent list. Provinces got additional power. But power was not supposed to stay there. It was supposed to be further devolved to local governments. This never happened as provinces and their bureaucracies don’t seem inclined to let go of power. And given that we didn’t have a very powerful democratic government at the centre, provinces didn’t help either. In some provinces, ineptness has broken new records. But that is due to political reasons, not constitutional ones.

Let us suppose for a moment, pretend that the Eighteenth Amendment was never passed. Do you see any change in the quality of governance then? I doubt it. Why? One reason is that from the tribal areas and Balochistan to Islamabad’s D-chowk during the Qadri-Khan sit-ins, the state’s monopoly on violence was severely tested. But the second reason is messier and far more terrifying. As the number of mouths to feed increases, the state’s self-confidence shakes.

Population, we were taught, doesn’t increase. It multiplies. And it has been multiplying for a while. Projections show that the population growth rate is coming down in Pakistan. It was 1.6 per cent, we are told, in 2013, which is 0.4 per cent more than India’s 1.2 per cent. But unlike India, ours is pure projection. We haven’t had a census in decades. Former prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani used to claim that we are 180 million even when his president and party chairman, Asif Ali Zardari, would mention a figure of 200 million. This was a source of many jokes. We used to laugh while reflecting that between the PM House and the Presidency, which stand side by side, 20 million are lost. We need population control because of the state’s inability to even take care of the existing number. But more importantly, we need new credible and verifiable numbers. Without credible census data, any development project will be akin to building castles in the air. Neither provinces nor the centre can deliver any significant results because they don’t get the exact measure of the improvement in the quality of life of the citizenry a specific project will offer.

But what stops successive governments from carrying out a census? If India, with its over 1.2 billion population, accomplished this in 2011, why can’t we? The first answer would take us back to the abysmal standards during Pervez Musharraf’s rule. An all-powerful dictator, who is erroneously praised for relatively better governance, systematically abandoned many causes, from the distribution system for clean drinking water to the census itself. Even after his rule, certain political pressure groups did not want to take chances with any serious study of demographic changes as it may challenge their hold. It is not easily acceptable to the sub-nationalist elements in Balochistan and interior Sindh. And in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa? Well, who are we kidding?

In its last days in office, the PPP government at the centre — and later the caretaker government — also tinkered with the measurement standards of various phenomena like poverty. But no matter how you redefine it, the spectres of hunger, poverty and falling standards of governance remain there. About time we started changing that. And the change can begin with stocktaking and a national population census.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st,  2015.

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