Why Pakistan Is Poor?

A Pakistani mother cooks leftover poultry for
 her family as food has became very expensive in
Pakistan due to consistent inflation.

Poverty in Pakistan is neither because of natural causes nor it is accidental; it is a political issue. It is the by-product of the elitist model of governance and misconceived macro policies that our ruling oligarchy has followed during the last 62 years. This has happened because neither benefits of development nor costs of economic adjustments appear to have been distributed equitably. Rather, the entire burden of adjustment has been imposed on the poor.

Poverty is the symptom of bad governance. Poverty mostly tends to take into account the economic indicators and ignore political, social and cultural indicators. The major economic indicators that affect the way poverty are income, consumption and prevailing power. Whereas, the political indicators that are creating poverty are related to power, i.e powerlessness, viz. absence of power to articulate, assert, negotiate, organize and fight for the rights is causing poverty. The social indicators like gap between different income classes i.e. income inequality creates social gaps among the members of the society and the cultural indicators that create poverty in Pakistan and South Asian context are due to the presence of traditions and informal mechanisms of sharing burden of 'have-nots' through direct transfers as charity, alms or others.

In addition to this, large family size, high population growth rate, poor educational attainment and skills, poor health and fertility indicators, economic and social inequality; rise in population, lack of access to justice and empowerment, corruption, inaccessibility of capital, increase in unemployment, low agricultural output and skewed pattern of landownership, slow industrialization and environment degradation are the key indicators of poverty.