Pakistan- the Balochistan Conundrum
Page 17
Water
While the overall water situation in Pakistan is precarious,49 it is nearing a crisis in Balochistan, which could have catastrophic consequences for the people of the province. One visible example is that of apples. More than 80 per cent of Pakistan’s total apple production comes from Balochistan. However, given the water shortage, the production of varieties of apples has declined. One fruit farmer lamented: ‘Since the land is not getting the required water, the apples produced are smaller in size.’50
The province is situated in an arid zone that receives low levels of rainfall. Despite this, the last storage dam was created thirty years ago. In 2007 Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) under the Drought Mitigation and Preparedness Program (DMPP) initiated a Rs 60 million project to construct small dams, but the project was soon marred by corruption. While the lack of rain has directly contributed to its water woes, the province has failed to preserve enough rainwater as a result of the government’s faulty planning.
The United Nations Development Programme, Pakistan, had conducted a drought risk assessment study in Balochistan in 2015. It noted that ‘Recurring drought is one of the major challenges faced by Balochistan province of Pakistan.’ It concluded that almost 60 to 70 per cent of the population is projected to be at direct or indirect risk from droughts in the area. Droughts have led to as high as 37 per cent average livestock losses in one district only—Lasbela. It cautioned that the dry conditions in Lasbela and Gwadar had forced locals to extract groundwater excessively to sustain agriculture. As a result, groundwater levels had gone down by more than 250 feet. Due to this, seawater was making the groundwater saline, thus affecting agriculture and forcing farmers to seek other livelihood options.51
Quetta, the capital, is reported to be on its way to becoming a desert with its rapidly falling water table, which has dropped by up to 30 m since 1989, according to one study. Beyond Quetta, the province’s water needs rank near the top of its development priorities.52 Environmentalists warn that if concrete steps are not taken, Quetta will witness large parts of its population being displaced in the near future.53
As if the double whammy of lack of rain and inadequate storage wasn’t enough, Balochistan also suffers from Sindh misappropriating its water. In 2016, protesting over 42 per cent water shortfall allegedly caused by Sindh irrigation authorities, the Balochistan government threatened to stay away from the meetings of the country’s water regulator—the Indus River System Authority (IRSA). From 1991 to 2014, it has been alleged that Balochistan got almost 50 per cent less water than it demanded resulting in losses of around Rs 93 billion to the province.54 In February 2018 Balochistan again accused Sindh of withholding its share of water, prompting IRSA to ask Sindh to ensure the drought-affected province got its share of water immediately. According to estimates in Balochistan, more than a quarter million acres would remain fallow due to lack of water for irrigation. The land is located in the Pat Feeder Command area in Naseerabad Division, the canal-irrigated region considered the food basket of Balochistan.55
According to a report submitted to the Senate by the Ministry of Water and Power, Balochistan faces a groundwater shortage of nearly catastrophic proportions. Due to excessive groundwater extraction, Balochistan’s water woes could increase manifold in the coming years. ‘With the introduction of deep-well pumping over the last three to four decades, groundwater resources have been rapidly depleted and levels have declined,’ the report said. According to it, groundwater is being overused in ten of the nineteen sub-basins in the province. ‘At this stage, groundwater use exceeds recharge by 22 per cent,’ the report underlined, singling out Pishin-Loralai as the largest area of groundwater imbalance.56
Or, take the case of Taftan in Balochistan’s Chagai district on Pakistan’s border with Iran. Water apart, Taftan symbolizes government’s policy of maximum extraction with little responsibility towards the people of Balochistan. Taftan tehsil has an estimated population of 25,000, of which about 7,000 live in Taftan town. Forget education and health services, the discrimination in water allocation is instructive. There is only one government tube well in Taftan town meant for supplying drinking water to its 7,000 residents. Those who can afford it use Iranian mineral water. It is not that water is not available. In fact, there is a huge water facility in Taftan whose eight tube wells supply 500 to 1,000 tonnes of water an hour, depending upon demand, for the Chinese-run Saindak copper project, a half-hour drive from Taftan town. The copper project functions 24/7 for nine months of the year.
Apart from the huge profits of the copper project, the customs post in Taftan generates substantial revenue—as much as Rs 2,211.371 million in duty in 2014 and Rs 5,249.169 million in 2015. None of this, however, is invested in Taftan or elsewhere in Balochistan to improve the quality of the people’s lives by providing water, education and health facilities. Baloch reconciliation would be difficult if such irresponsible extraction continues.57
National Finance Commission (NFC)
The seventh National Finance Commission (NFC) award, 2009, altered the revenue distribution in favour of smaller provinces. Prior to the award, population was the sole criterion for distribution of revenue collected by the federal government from the entire country. However, in the seventh NFC the weightage of population was reduced to 82 per cent. Poverty and backwardness was given 10.3 per cent weightage, revenue generation 5 per cent and inverse population density 2.7 per cent. Balochistan was the biggest beneficiary of this new arrangement: its share in the revenues jumped from 5.11 per cent to 9.09 per cent.
Prior to the seventh NFC, the provincial budgetary outlay was Rs 71 billion and the Public Sector Development Plan (PSDP) was only Rs 16 billion for the entire province in 2009-10. The seventh NFC award considerably bolstered the financial kitty of the province. Balochistan received Rs 40 billion under the federal transfers in 2009-10; that went up to Rs 141.9 billion in 2013-14. In 2015 the development budget alone was more than Rs 86 billion. When the National Party (NP) coalition government came to power in 2013, the total budgetary outlay was less than Rs 200 billion, but by 2017 budget figures had almost doubled.58
This tremendous upsurge of the financial resources was an opportunity to improve services and infrastructure in the province. The moot question was whether the increase in resource availability had changed the socio-economic conditions of the people or the development deficit and infrastructure development? The simple answer is: no. While exploitation by the federal government was an irrefutable reason behind the miseries of Balochistan, apathetic plunder of the residual resources by the local bureaucracy and legislators was also a reality.
For one thing, there has been a serious problem of prioritization. Instead of completing ongoing programmes, new schemes are added every year, thus postponing the completion of the earlier projects. In 2017 alone 1,035 new projects were added, although there were already 1,258 unfinished projects.59 Moreover, the increase in the NFC award has been mostly absorbed by the increase in development funds for legislators and payments to federal security agencies on ‘internal security’ duty in the province.60
There are also other issues with the NFC. The term of the seventh NFC award expired on 30 June 2015. The PML-N government under Nawaz Sharif and subsequently Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, whose term expired in May 2018, did not show any interest in a new NFC award. Instead, the award was extended through presidential orders. As a result, the same old formulae are being imposed through Distribution of Revenues and Grants-in-Aid (Amendment) Order, 2015. This means that the poverty figures from 1998 are being used in 2017 even though latest poverty figures calculated by the UNDP and adopted by the planning commission are available. The continuation of the seventh NFC beyond its mandated term has adversely affected Balochistan. The reason is that the seventh NFC downplayed poverty in Balochistan. As a result, it has been calculated that Balochistan is losing up to Rs 28 billion annually from its share of the federal divisible pool due to technical wizardry.61 Not only is this
extremely unfair but the decision of the PML-N government to extend the seventh NFC formulae beyond 2015 is also considered unconstitutional.
According to Adnan Aamir, the Quetta-based editor of the online ‘Baloch Voices’, in the seventh NFC award, the poverty figures of all provinces were compiled from three different reports: Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper-I (PRSP-I) titled ‘Accelerating Economic Growth and Reducing Poverty: the Road Ahead’, published by the Finance Division in 2003 based on data of 1998-99; ‘Pakistan National Human Development Report 2003’ published by the UNDP; and the Province-wise HDI report published by the Statistics Division in 2008. Composite poverty figure for NFC share was calculated based on aggregate of poverty figures in these three reports. Based on this aggregate, poverty component of NFC was divided among the provinces where it was 23.17 per cent in Punjab, 23.42 per cent in Sindh, 27.83 per cent in NWFP (now KPK) and 25.62 per cent in Balochistan.62 According to Aamir, the problem with the usage of these three poverty reports is that they were already outdated and did not represent the factual poverty situation in the country in 2009 when the seventh NFC was drafted. This resulted in unfair distribution of share from the federal divisible pool, where smaller provinces like Balochistan lost out.
He elaborates this point further by pointing out that a comparison of the poverty levels in Balochistan with other provinces shows that they were, more or less, the same as per the above reports. This was unjust for obvious reasons because there is far more poverty in Balochistan compared to the other three provinces. As a result, the 10.3 per cent share reserved for poverty and backwardness was to an extent rendered ineffective due to manipulation of data on the pretext of unavailability of latest poverty measurement reports. Resultantly, provinces with higher poverty rates did not get their due share from the NFC as they were supposed to.
In June 2016 the UNDP, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the Federal Ministry of Planning and Development published a Report on Multidimensional Poverty 2016. This report measured poverty in the country using three indicators, health, education and standard of living, and sixteen sub-indicators. Based on these indicators, the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) was calculated for each province which, when translated into percentage, presented a much more realistic picture of poverty. According to this report, MPI is 0.394 in Balochistan, 0.25 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 0.231 in Sindh and 0.152 in Punjab. These figures seem more realistic because there is a huge difference between poverty in Balochistan and other provinces.63
When the new poverty figures extracted from the Report on Multidimensional Poverty 2016 are used for calculating the provincial share as the seventh NFC had done, the share of Balochistan jumps from 9.09 per cent to 10.41 per cent. The estimated amount of the federal divisible pool for fiscal year 2016-17 was Rs 2.135 trillion. An increase of 1.32 per cent in share of Balochistan translates into approximately Rs 28 billion. Simply put, Balochistan has already been deprived of approximately Rs 28 billion per year from its due share in the federal divisible pool due to manipulation of poverty figures in the last three budgets. Balochistan will continue to lose an amount in similar proportion till the time a new NFC award based on accurate poverty figures is not announced.64
The amount of Rs 28 billion per annum that Balochistan is not getting can be used to educate approximately one million children, hire 45,000 new teachers or build 7,000 new primary schools. This is inferred from an analysis of Annual Status of Education Report and Pakistan Education Statistics Report of Idara Taleem-o-Agahi from 2011 to 2016.65
Another interesting aspect of the federal PSDP allocations for the Physical Planning and Housing/Housing and Works sector in Balochistan is that, on an average, 78 per cent of allocations for schemes during the period 1990–2016 was for security agencies and federal civil administration offices and housing. In eleven of these years the average share of allocations for security agencies and federal civil administration offices and houses was 100 per cent. In fact, not one single scheme in the Balochistan component of federal PSDPs, between 1990 and 2016, was for housing for the civilian population.66
Whenever someone asks the federal government about how they plan to improve the economic condition in Balochistan, the standard reply these days is ‘China–Pak Economic Corridor (CPEC).’ The federal government proudly claims that the corridor will prove to be a game-changer and change the fate of the people of Balochistan. Unfortunately, these are nothing more than hollow claims. The proposed economic corridor will only pass through a portion of the province and can’t change the lives of all the people of the province.67 Secondly, there is no guarantee that the people of Balochistan will get jobs after the establishment of this corridor. In the past the Baloch have been ignored in mega projects such as the Saindak copper–gold project, the Reko Diq project and the Gwadar port project. As discussed in the chapter on CPEC, it is unlikely to be the solution to the employment problems, let alone the economic problems of Balochistan.68
10
Socio-Economic Deprivation
THE IMPACT OF THE POLITICAL and administrative marginalization and economic exploitation is clearly reflected in the socio-economic deprivation of the province. According to economist Kaiser Bengali, empirical evidence shows that Balochistan has suffered and continues to suffer systematic economic exploitation, discrimination and neglect. He laments: ‘Balochistan’s all-round underdevelopment is an open and festering wound. The province ranks low—and significantly so—in terms of income statistics and high—and significantly so—in terms of poverty statistics.’1
The deprivation of the province has been highlighted in several credible reports. To reiterate figures from the World Bank report of 20082 referred to earlier, Balochistan has the weakest long-term growth, the worst quality of employment and the weakest social development performance of all provinces. From 1972-73 to 2004-05, the economy expanded 2.7 times in Balochistan, 3.6 times in NWFP and Sindh and 4.0 times in Punjab. The growth divergence has widened historic income differences and Balochistan’s per capita income level of $400 in 2004 was only two-thirds of Pakistan’s level. Balochistan’s rate of structural change and urbanization was also lower than elsewhere. According to the report, Balochistan scored lowest among the provinces on key indicators for education, literacy, health, water and sanitation in 2006-07. It also stood out as the province with the worst record on gender equality. Other reports and surveys confirm this grim picture of Balochistan painted by the World Bank.
Unemployment
The number of unemployed persons in Balochistan (0.06 million) in 2012 constituted about 20 per cent of the total number of unemployed persons (3.05 million) in the country, indicating a disproportionately high number given that Balochistan accounts for only 6 per cent of the total population of Pakistan.3
Excluding Quetta, the other districts in Balochistan provided little or no employment opportunities for the people. Agriculture was the primary source of employment in Balochistan and it has been badly affected by the water and electricity shortages. Unemployment, in fact, was increasing; a 2007 study on demographic transition, education and youth employment found that young people in Balochistan were twice as likely to be without a job as their Punjab counterparts.4
According to Kaiser Bengali, Balochistan is a province of only 1.5 million families and at one job per family, it needs a mere 1.5 million jobs. This, he notes, is eminently feasible, given the vast and varied agricultural, horticultural, fisheries and, in particular, mineral resources in the province. He estimates that Balochistan could become a zero-unemployment province in less than half a decade and attain single-digit incidence of poverty and illiteracy in a decade. ‘That Balochistan faces mass unemployment, mass poverty, mass illiteracy and pervasive hunger is incomprehensible and inexcusable.’5
The impact of unemployment was obvious. For example, some police officials told a delegation of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan that men in Panjgur and Turbat were desperate for a livelihood and such a conditi
on forced them to accept help from any quarter; be they friendly to the state or hostile to it.6
Poverty
The Sustainable Development Policy Institute’s (SDPI) ‘Geography of Poverty’ estimates poverty by using twenty-seven indicators pertaining to four dimensions of well-being, i.e., education, health, living conditions and assets ownership.7 It looks at national, provincial and district-level trends from 2008 to 2013. The report not only highlights the districts where poverty is high but also tracks the changes in the level of poverty in individual districts over a five-year period. In 2012-13 the multidimensional poverty headcount was 62.6 per cent in Balochistan, 39.3 per cent in Khyber Paktunkhwa (KPK), 37.5 per cent in Sindh and 24.3 per cent in Punjab. Of this, 46.2 per cent of the population of Balochistan was living in extreme poverty compared to 26.6 per cent in KPK, 24.6 per cent in Sindh and 15.4 per cent in Punjab. At the national level, 18.6 per cent of the population was living in extreme poverty. While only 5.07 per cent of Pakistan’s population lived in Balochistan, 10.2 per cent of the country’s poor lived there in 2012-13. In the same year (2012-13) 17.8 per cent of Pakistan’s poor lived in KPK and 28.0 per cent in Sindh. With 57.42 per cent population of Pakistan living in Punjab, its contribution to total poverty was 44.5 per cent in 2012-13.8
Based on poverty headcount ratios, districts were classified into five zones or quintiles. The geographic concentration of poverty was evident from the fact that out of fifty-six districts in the bottom two quintiles (poverty figures ranging from 72.6 per cent to 96.4 per cent in the bottom quintile and from 50 per cent to 72 per cent in the fourth quintile), twenty-three were from Balochistan, eleven from Sindh, eight from KPK and two from Punjab. Districts that were largely rural and had low population were the ones with the highest headcount ratio.9