February 19 , 2010
Slow Progress in Pakistan
Although Pakistan has returned to democracy in the last two years, it remains a very poor country with too many of its citizens poor, ill-educated, and without proper medical care. This has been the reality of life for the vast majority of Pakistanis since independence. But are we making any progress? Where do we stand now? And if the obvious benchmark is neighboring India, how are we doing compared to them, given that we both started from roughly the same spot?
There are about 170 million Pakistanis now, compared with 140 million counted in the last census in 1998, and only 35 million in 1948. Life expectancy has now reached 67 years, compared with 63 in 2000. This is actually a decent number, and two years higher than India. However, childhood mortality is higher in Pakistan. 9% of Pakistani children die before reaching the age of 5, compared with 7% in India, and less than 1% in a developed country.
This year, roughly 350,000 Pakistani children will die, the vast majority needlessly. The double tragedy of maternal mortality is still a scourge in Pakistan as 1 in 300 women die in childbirth. In India, this is even worse, at 1 in 200.
India continues to do much better than Pakistan in education. Male literacy is 75% and female 55% in India, compared with 70% and 40% respectively in Pakistan. And while 33% of Pakistani children get a secondary education, 45% do so in India.
Due to the high prevalence of young marriages in India, teenage pregnancy rates in India are actually higher than in Pakistan. But Pakistani women on average bear 3.9 children over their lifetime, while Indian women are bearing 2.7. This higher fertility continues to drive a more rapid growth in population and a younger age structure than in India. Since 1948, India’s population has not quite tripled, while Pakistan’s has soared almost five-fold.
On the economic front, India has surpassed Pakistan in per capita income. In 2007, per capita income in India was 2740 dollars compared with 2540 dollars in Pakistan. Since then India’s economy has grown faster than Pakistan’s so that gap has gotten larger. Despite that, in many ways the two countries have similar standards of living. Energy use per person is the same in Pakistan and India. 90% of the population in both countries has access to improved drinking water sources. In 2008, there were 53 cell phones for every hundred Pakistanis, compared with 30 phones per hundred Indians. There were 11 Internet users per hundred people in Pakistan compared with 7 in India.
Overall, Pakistan is now considered a “Medium Human Development” nation. It ranks 141 in the world and India takes the 134 spot. Both nations have made substantial progress since 1980, and at about the same rate. But they both have a long way to go.
Too many governments in Pakistan have failed to make education and health care the absolute priorities that they must be. There is no excuse for a Pakistani child not having a decent primary education and becoming literate. There is no excuse for a child not getting basic immunizations that will prevent a needless death. In this century, no nation can succeed with an ill-educated population, and no nation will fail that provides a good education to its citizens.
The Pakistani government must raise spending on education and health to 8% of GDP. It must also get its economy in order and restore the rapid growth that is needed to develop the country. Since the PPP took over, the economy has ground to a halt with growth running less than 2% per year compared with 7% under Musharraf. High growth and increased investment in the people will turn Pakistan into a developed country in 25 years.
