The state of human development in Pakistan, measured by the famous Human Development Index, has improved marginally between 2005 and 2015. The country is still caught in the medium-development bracket, even as a wide majority of districts in its biggest province (by population) have graduated from low and medium development to high development during this period.
The recently released national HDI Report 2017 by UNDP Pakistan, the first in more than a decade, reveals that in 2005 about 76 percent of the districts, whose data was available for that year, were categorized in the low-HDI bracket. In 2015, only 45 percent (51 districts out of total 114) are categorized as such.
While UNDP Pakistan has used six classifications to analyse Pakistan’s district-wise HDI data, for clarity sake, the table here uses the classifications defined by UNDP’s mothership, where HDI classifications are based on fixed HDI cut-off points that are derived from the quartiles of distributions of the component indicators (highest score = 1). The cut-off points are: HDI of less than 0.550 for low human development; 0.550 – 0.699 for medium human development; 0.700 – 0.799 for high human development; and 0.800 or greater for very high human development.
According to the report, majority of the districts in KP have outperformed those in Sindh, “even though the provincial HDI of Sindh is slightly better than that of KP.” This is because almost 40 percent of Sindh’s population resides in Karachi and Hyderabad, the most developed districts in Sindh.
“However, in terms of district performance, KP’s median value of district HDIs is 0.10 points greater than that of Sindh,” the UNDP notes adding the implication that although a greater number of people enjoy higher levels of HDI in Sindh as compared to KP, the latter experiences a better situation in terms of administrative bodies (districts).
If 88 percent of the districts in KP belonged to low human development in 2005, in 2015 about 32 percent of the total districts in KP fell in that classification of development. Similar improvements are visible in Punjab.
Falling behind are Sindh and Balochistan. There are only two districts in Sindh, Karachi and Hyderabad, that belong to high or very high human development, whereas Balochistan has none; even Quetta falls in the medium development category. Quetta’s score has in fact worsened over the years, from 0.677 in 2005 to 0.664 in 2015.
The UNDP Pakistan’s effort is much appreciated here. However, in order to make this an annual publication, this task should be assigned to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS). After all, all the data that has fed into this analysis came from the various surveys done by the PBS. Why should donor-money be channeled into producing district-wise HDI data? Are these calculations beyond the capacity of the PBS?
If the government of Pakistan sees value in producing this data, and there is indeed some value especially after fiscal and political devolution, then it should task and train the PBS to produce this dataset every year, instead of using donor-money for this exercise.
Second, it’s one thing to know what has happened; its another to know the reasons why. The UNDP HDI report offers plenty of insights into what has happened, but the reader is left clueless about the reasons of those changes in the district-wise HDI scores and its components.
Whatever reasons explained are somewhat tautological: HDI score of a certain district improved because of XYZ sub-index for that district improved. Whether it was because of certain policies, politics, governance or perhaps unintended consequences of something else that happened in some other time or space; the reader doesn’t know.
It is understandable that the UNDP Pakistan could not have done in-depth analysis for each of the 100 plus districts. But it could have analysed the causes for at least some of them – say the top-ten and bottom-ten performing districts by HDI growth during 2005-2015 – to glean summarised lessons for the rest of the districts.
According to the report, the UNDP Pakistan reached out to more than hundred thousand young people across the country, in addition to 1300 hundred experts and key stakeholder meetings, to develop an understanding of Pakistan’s youth.
When it can undertake such an exhaustive exercise, it can surely analyse the reasons of changes in HDI scores.
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