ON POVERTY-DRIVEN SUICIDES





No one can have a measure of the intensity of despair that drove Bushra Bibi on April 12 to stand in front of a speeding train in Lahore with her two children — one a boy of five and the other a girl of three. She compounded her own act of suicide with the more heart-searing crime of infanticide.


Mothers give life; they don't take it away. In her final movements, Bushra Bibi, in an instinctive gesture of maternal concern, covered the eyes of her children with her hands, to spare them the terrifying sight of the approaching train.


For Bushra Bibi, anything — even death — was preferable to the poverty that had ground her life into the dust to which she had decided to return. For her, the only light at the end of the tunnel was the light of the oncoming train.


The new prime minister and the even newer chief minister of Punjab called on her anguished husband to give him some belated financial succour. Wherever Bushra Bibi may be at the moment, she can now rest in peace. By her death, her husband has been ensured the solvency he could not provide her or their children during their own brief lives.


If poverty was the reason that drove Bushra Bibi to such terminal despair, then the railway tracks of Pakistan should be cleared to receive up to 50 million more such Bushra Bibis, for there are at least that many citizens who are sliding inexorably into the abyss of domestic penury. Is the figure today 26 per cent of the population, as it was in 1993? Is it closer to 32 per cent, the number six years later? Or could it be even higher now?


In February 2000, Mr Shahid Javed Burki (one of Pakistan's most respected economists and then working in the World Bank) predicted that by the year 2010 Pakistan's population would reach 170 million of whom 80 million (47 per cent) would be living below the poverty line.


In 2006, his colleague John Wall (then World Bank chief in Pakistan) wrote: "Poverty is an ethical concept, not a statistical one," and to support his assertion, he explained: "The incomes of a very large portion of the population are just above and just below the official poverty line.… This clustering of Pakistan's population just above and just below the poverty line also implies that families are quite vulnerable to falling into poverty with the slightest run of bad luck. A drought or bad agricultural year, an illness of a breadwinner, rises in prices of basic commodities not compensated by rises in income — all these can cause families to fall into poverty." In effect, poor families bob above and below the surface of life, like someone drowning, struggling to survive.


To some dollar-earning economists, poverty may be an ethical concept, to others, a moribund statistic. To our poor, however, it is neither. It is a daily reality. By opting to quit society, it is not they who have failed as citizens; it is their government that has failed them. To governments, poverty is an inconvenient social obstacle. They would prefer not to have to count the ribs of that sub-species of Pakistanis to whom official platitudes are indigestible fodder, and political promises something that taste of sawdust.


The Labour firebrand Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan once flailed a Conservative government during the 1950s with the taunt that it required mismanagement of a very high order for the UK — an island race, surrounded by the sea and resting on a bed of coal — to suffer a shortage both of fish to eat and coal to burn.


Had he visited today's Pakistan he might have been equally derisive. How, he would have wondered, as millions of us Pakistanis do, does a country with acres of arable land, some of the mightiest rivers in the word linked by a well-designed canal system, a sub-tropical climate, and a primarily rural population suffer from shortages of food? Had we been a communist state, our flaws would have been blamed on collective farming compounded by archaic distribution methods.


We have had eight years of uninterrupted mono-rail governance, in which every expert in the country has been available to the government. And to be fair to the government, each such expert — whether from the cogwheels of industry, from the laboratories of science and technology, from the classrooms of education, from the open fields of agriculture, or from the corridors of the civil service — has been allowed a say in the formulation of our public policies.


Has one forgotten the much-vaunted Economic Advisory Board? In December 1999, a fresh finance minister opened a four-day meeting of an economic advisory board comprising over 200 experts to draw up economic reforms in areas such as "foreign investment, trade and balance of payments, energy, privatisation, agriculture, domestic debt management, devolution of administrative power, and reforms of economic institutions". Subcommittees were formed, recommendations refined, plans made, legislation passed, and then what?


Eight years on, foreign investment has been in the non-productive sector; with gushing oil prices our balance of trade is beyond our control; domestic debt is ballooning; devolution has failed and is being reversed; and institutions have been reformed without palpable improvement in service delivery. We stand at the precipice of another energy crisis, and our success in agriculture can be measured from the length of the queues for atta outside our utility stores.


Optimists say that much has been achieved, pessimists that much more remains to be done. It depends on whether you view the glass as half-full or half-empty. All the impoverished know is that, after years of waiting and hoping and now voting, the glass in their emaciated hands is still near empty.


Is there light at the end of the tunnel for them? Or are they condemned to forgo wheat because it is beyond their reach, abjure sugar and tea because they are too expensive, and walk because petrol is unaffordable?


As an employee who every month has to stretch his income to cover his sprawling expenses, complained recently: "Our leaders tell us that they have broken the begging bowl. Others boast that we have spread a web of roads across the country. Tell me, sahib, can I feed my children roads?"