A World Bank report declares that poverty reduction “has come to a troubling halt, reversing years of progress.” Indeed, poverty, which fell from over 64% of Pakistanis in 2001 to about 22% in 2019, has climbed back to roughly 25% in 2023?24. Two decades of decline have thus been erased, undoing gains in literacy, health and income that ordinary families fought so hard to achieve.
What lies behind this reversal? From 2020 onward, inflation, pandemic lockdowns and catastrophic floods smacked into a vulnerable economy, pulling millions just above the poverty line back under water. Even in 2018, fully 14% of households were living on the edge: one bad harvest, one interest rate jump away from starvation. With supply chains creaking and jobs mired in low?productivity informality, our people were cruelly exposed.
Yet the truth is that these vulnerabilities were our own making. Successive governments chose quick fixes over real reform. Billions have been poured into untargeted subsidies and relief programmes, from electricity handouts to expanded cash transfers, while investments in schools, health clinics and rural livelihoods were starved. That poverty in Pakistan is being manufactured and maintained through decisions that entrench inequality and suppress opportunity cannot be emphasised enough. The FY2026 budget, for example, mainly showered largesse on elites. Salaries and pensions were boosted for ministers and judges even as ordinary salaries were squeezed, while households struggling below the poverty line were offered little more than slogans. This is naked short?termism.
Meanwhile, the fundamentals of human development have been neglected. Only about 61% of Pakistanis are literate, and health care financing is similarly paltry. Not surprisingly, nearly 40% of our children are chronically malnourished and one-quarter of them never even step into a classroom. How can a country prosper if its people cannot read, work or live healthy lives?
Natural calamities have delivered harsh lessons, too. The 2022 monsoon and this summer’s floods submerged vast areas of farmland and cities alike. But these were not “acts of God” alone. Experts warned years ago that unchecked development, from deforestation to flawed mega?projects, would turn rivers into wrecking balls. A recent Human Rights Watch report calls out a “string of failures” by governments, notably the dubious Lahore Riverfront project, whose barrage and concrete ‘housing’ would drown upstream villages – warnings that officials blithely ignored, with precisely the predicted consequences.
