Sindh in the trap of poverty

Recently I had an opportunity to visit Interior Sindh, and was anguished to see the degree of deficit in development side. No wonder you will witness the roads, bridges, parks for recreation, colleges and universities but intercity roads are in total shambles. One of my colleague told me that since 1970’s, there has been no major development and each dictator from Zia to Musharraf patronized their few feudal who were loyal to them and put the development on the back burner.

Majority of people are still living in shabby conditions and are deprived of basic amenities of life for instance, proper housing, sanitation, Medicare and availability of drinkable water. The underdevelopment and deprivation people are facing is not new but have been piling up since long and ironically no government, democratic or dictatorship has done anything substantial to alleviate the sufferings of people. Every year budget is announced for the social and economic development but the flip side is that, we don’t see any collision on the ground in terms of change in life style and livelihoods of people; it looks people are still living in medieval era.

What perturbed to my mind was the level and scale of poverty people are living in and perhaps the poverty has further been augmented by the floods of last years. Still people are reeling around the pains caused by torrential rains. The reason for this situation is soaring volume of unemployment. Perhaps John Maynard Keynes (An economist) had rightly said that the key function of state is to create employment, and for that he opined that it is good if private sector comes forward to invest in the industry but if private sector is not coming forth to invest for any reason then it is state responsibility to invest in the Industry in order to create employment. But here, Sindh government, which is being led by PPP has totally failed and the soaring unemployment has given rise to crime such as kidnapping for ransom, tribal conflicts and other social evils that are affecting the transition of society from traditional to modern one and pushing it under the rug of feudalism.

Here the role of feudal reminds of Mancur Olson (American economist an social scientist) story of "Roving Bandits and Stationary Bandits". Feudal are working like roving bandits plundering and stealing the vital resources of Sindh which otherwise can be used for alleviating mass poverty through the generation of employment by investing and establishing industry.

It hurts when to see the plight of Sindh. It is being ravaged by the tyranny of terrorism and poverty, despite being rich province in natural resources. It has large reserves of oil and gas and coal. It has ports and Karachi as commercial hub of Pakistan, contributing almost 68% to national revenue generation but ironically the lower parts of lie in shamble economic conditions, with no industrial base though there are some districts which have industrial zones to be developed by the district government but due to worsening law and order situation in the province no investor is ready to invest and establish industries.

In addition to that Sindh is oil and gas rich province – it produces 71% gas and 61% oil, and altogether it produces almost 72% of total oil and gas production of Pakistan. The daily production of oil and gas in Sindh is about 67,140 barrels and 3.99 billion cubic feet respectively. Yet economically it is still one of the backward provinces, with soaring poverty, high rate of unemployment and widening inequalities between rural and urban Sindh.

A New York Times book review of a titled “A New Deal in Pakistan” by William Dalrymple says the following about Sindh: “.. in fact, it is one of the most backward areas in all of Asia. Whatever index of development you choose to dwell on-literacy, health care provision, daily income, or numbers living below the poverty line-rural Sindh comes bumping along close to the bottom”.

When oil and gas was explored, it was believed that poverty will be history and Sindh will be rich like Dubai. But so far it has mere remained pipe dream due to unethical policies of oil companies, trampling down their social responsibilities towards society. According to CSR principles, oil companies have to spend 1% of their earnings on the development of the local areas to establish schools and hospital and building roads but nothing of the sort is happening and people are dependent on Zakat and Rs 1000.00 given to poor families under Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP).

According to research archives of Participatory Development Imitative (PDI), oil companies are supposed to give production bonus to be spent on the development of the area. But instead production bonus was given to federal government. PDI took initiative to talk to Sindh government which was quite negligent of production bonus. Finally, after long advocacy and struggle Rs 2.5 billion were given to Sindh government and surprisingly that money is still lying in the coffers of Sindh government, not being spent on the socioeconomic development of oil producing districts? For example, Look at the plight of Badin districts, one of the major oil producing districts almost produces 60% of oil but its socioeconomic plight is alarming. It ranks at number 90 in the Human Development Index of 106 districts of Pakistan.

In addition to oil and gas, Sindh is home to one of the large reserves of coal, proverbially known as ‘Black Gold. According to different studies, the reserves of coal are estimated at 850 trillion cubic feet (TFC) of gas, about 30 times higher than Pakistan’s proven gas reserves of 28 TCF. Further studies show, if all the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Iran put together these are approximately 375 billion barrels. But a single Thar coal reserve is about 850 trillion TCF, which is more than combined oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Iran.

According to some studies, these reserves of coal worth $25 trillion cannot only cater the electricity requirements of the country for next 100 years but also can save almost $4 billion in soaring import bill of oil.

According to experts, just 2% usage of Thar coal can produce 20,000 mega watts of electricity for next 40 years, without any single second of load shedding.

These experts opine that the coal power generation would cost Pakistan Rs 5.67 per unit while power generated by independent power producers cost Rs 9.27. These experts are of the view that the development of Thar coal just requires initial investment of Rs 420 billion. The good and inspiring thing is that at the moment work on the development of Thar coal is going on under the supervision of Pakistan’s imminent nuclear Samar Mubarak-Mand.

As matter of fact, the development of all these vital resources of Sindh needs good and democratic governance which Benazir Bhutto widely talked about in her book Reconciliation: Islam , Democracy and the West” published posthumously. She considered democratic governance central to sustainable development, strengthening of democracy and democratic institutions. And in fact, democracy is about enhancing people capacities and giving them choices. To achieve this goal, there is need for proper planning which requires government to give first priority to the improvement of law and order situation, encouraging people to open up business and for that they should be provided with loans easily. Youth, especially business graduates should be encouraged to open up business; new training centers should be opened in order to meet out the needs of skilled labor which is a key to the whole process of development.

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Published in Business Review, Dawn