POVERTY

POVERTY

Poverty may focus on material needs, typically including the necessities of daily living, such as food, clothing, shelter, or safe drinking water. Poverty in this sense may be understood as a condition in which a person or community is lacking in the basic needs for a minimum standard of well-being and life, particularly as a result of a persistent lack of income.

Analysis of social aspects of poverty links conditions of scarcity to aspects of the distribution of resources and power in a society and recognizes that poverty may be a function of the diminished "capability" of people to live the kinds of lives they value. The social aspects of poverty may include lack of access to information, education, health care, or political power. Poverty may also be understood as an aspect of unequal social status and inequitable social relationships, experienced as social exclusion, dependency, and diminished capacity to participate, or to develop meaningful connections with other people in society.

Poverty in Pakistan is a growing concern. Although the middle-class has grown in Pakistan, nearly one-quarter of the population is classified poor. The declining trend in poverty as seen in the country during the 1970s and 1980s was reversed in the 1990s by poor federal policies and rampant corruption. The government of Pakistan with help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has prepared an Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper that suggests guidelines to reduce poverty in the country. According to the World Bank, the program has had tangible success, with the World Bank stating that poverty has fallen by 5 percent since 2000. As of 2006, Pakistan's Human Development Index (HDI) is slightly higher than that of nearby Bangladesh, which was formerly a part of the country itself. Pakistan's HDI still stands lower than that of neighboring India.

There are so many causes due to which poverty in Pakistan worsened i.e. the gender discriminatory practices in Pakistani society also shape the distribution of poverty in the country. Traditional gender roles in Pakistan define the woman's place as in the home and not in the workplace, and define the man as the breadwinner. Consequently, the society invests far less in women than men. Women in Pakistan suffer from poverty of opportunities throughout their lives. Female literacy in Pakistan is less as compared to Male literacy. Moreover, Female labour rates in Pakistan are exceptionally low. Similarly, Environmental problems in Pakistan, such as erosion, use of agro-chemicals, deforestation etc. contributes to rising poverty in Pakistan. The increase in poverty rate is also caused due to an adequate lack of governance. For example, corruption and political instabilities such as various separatist movements in Balochistan and Waziristan resulted in reduction of business confidence, deterioration of economic growth, reduced public expenditure, poor delivery of public services, and undermining of the rule of law. The perceived security threat on the border with India has dominated Pakistan's culture and has led to the domination of military in politics, excessive spending on defense at the expense of social sectors, and the erosion of law and order. Another cause of rise in poverty rate is the feudalism in Pakistan. Pakistan is home to a large feudal landholding system where landholding families hold thousands of acres and do little work on the agriculture themselves.

To overcome the constant rise in poverty, government along with its people should concentrate on improving provincial resource management capacity for better efficiency of human development investments i.e. females should be given equal rights in any organization; financing incremental services (new teachers, textbooks, medicines, etc.); improving quality of primary education by supporting changes in governance structures and institutions; promoting public-private/civil society partnerships in order to devolve service responsibilities to local governments; and improving municipal services in order to devolve municipal functions to local governments, with particular focus on services for the poor.