During a week that is rocked by the imposition of emergency and the governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, what event or revelation or thought has disturbed you the most?
Have you lost sleep over something during this time? Or have you been too confused to decipher your own state of mind? Or do you just not care?
If you take your cue from political pundits, the big event now is the (temporary?) removal of the PTI’s provincial government in KP through measures that lack democratic spirit.
A detailed analysis of what this means would certainly be quite valid. There is this surge in terrorist violence in KP and also in Balochistan. Besides, the long march that was being led by the removed chief minister Sohail Afridi had also caused massive civic disruptions.
But I am more concerned about cracks that are widening in our society, beyond politics. Here is something that could threaten the very survival of this country. In fact, I cannot understand why our rulers are not addressing these crises, which are getting more and more vicious. Do they not see that the Pakistani society is coming apart ats the seams?
This has been my refrain, yes. But I will restrict myself to what has been reported in the media this week. I regret that I don’t have space to include all the headlines related to social decline and disorder. In recent years, we have fallen to the bottom of South Asia in many crucial social development indicators. The gap now appears to be widening. Does your heart not sink when you contemplate this reality?
Perhaps the Peshawar tragedy in which at least 30 children and a female teacher were killed when the roof of a private school collapsed on Thursday does not belong in this tally. We may consider this an accident, though it also exemplifies the state of education in the country. We talk a lot about the constitution in the context of protecting democratic values, but what about the government’s constitutional responsibility to provide free primary education to all children in the country? Will there be a long march to demand this fundamental right?
Anyhow, the Peshawar tragedy has deepened the gloom that is surrounding us. I do feel that this heartbreaking event also portrays a deprived and potentially flawed society. We see glimpses of growing poverty here, and this is my first reference to a headline I read in the print media on Tuesday.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in New York on Monday. According to this index, 38.3% of Pakistan’s population was multidimensionally poor, compared with 16.4% in India and 14.9% in Bangladesh.
I ask you to read these figures again, pause and think. The estimates are based on household surveys conducted in different years and do not provide a strictly contemporaneous comparison. What we gather, surely, is that more than one third of Pakistan’s population faces overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards.
The intensity of deprivation among those classified as multidimensionally poor stood at 51.7% in Pakistan. Another 12.5% of the population was considered vulnerable to multidimensional poverty, indicating that a substantial share of the people remained at risk of falling into acute deprivation.
We have plenty of material in UNDP’s MPI report, but I’m moving on to another assessment from the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting of Global Future Leaders, which opened in Dubai on Tuesday. It includes a discussion on how to boost youth employment in Pakistan for the age of AI.
It revealed that only 7% of Pakistan’s youth have access to formal technical and vocational training, compared with the regional average of 22%. Take another pause. We may also recall how our leaders have sometimes underlined the benefits of our pronounced youth bulge. The World Bank estimates that this skill gap costs Pakistan $31.5 billion annually in lost productivity and unrealised export potential. There is another report that can also be mentioned briefly. On Wednesday, the 2026 Global Hunger Index was released. This index is published jointly by a German institute and a Swiss organisation under the theme: “No security without food security”.
In this report, Pakistan recorded the highest score in South Asia, reflecting a worsening food security crisis driven by economic instability, climate shocks, and global conflicts. Progress in South Asia has largely stagnated, with conditions in Pakistan and Afghanistan deteriorating since 2018.
While child stunting remains very high in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is noted that Pakistan’s stunting rate continues to fall whereas Afghanistan’s has edged up since 2018. This is hard to accept.
Finally, I have a number of stories about violent crime and the kind of behaviour of that portrays mental health issues. In addition, it appears that cases of scams and fraud are increasing. Similarly, the crisis of child sex abuse and of rape of young women remains evident in reports from various parts of the country.
But let me conclude with what was discovered in Karachi on Tuesday morning. Five members of a family were found dead inside their one-room house in a housing society that was locked from inside. The police said that a man and his wife had bullet wounds, while their little daughters, aged five and three, and the man’s younger sister bore no injury marks. There was a handwritten suicide note, with some blood on it, that mentioned severe financial difficulties.
Incidentally, this seemed to be a replay of the mysterious deaths of a doctor, his wife and their three daughters in a locked apartment in another neighbourhood in Karachi last month. But these stories easily get lost in the noise our politicians and rulers make.
The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at: [email protected]
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect Geo.tv’s editorial policy.
Originally published in The News
