PROTECTING POOR’S ENTITLEMENTS

Allah Nawaz Samo

“Development is a momentous engagement with freedom’s possibilities”. Amartya Sen

The range of freedom’s possibilities that people in our country reason to value is freedom
from hunger, disease and illiteracy. They endeavor to achieve all the three, without being
one at the expense of other, through managing a delicate balance in household economy.
One of the adverse effects of current inflation is distortion of this balance in a way that
education and health of poor and salaried middle class are being critically compromised.

A recent estimation of World Food Programme reveals that ‘middling poor, those on $2 a
day, are pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables. Those on $1 a day
are cutting back on vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl.’ This
strategy adopted to cope with inadequate entitlement to food at household’s level
predisposes to an insidious process of endemic under-nutrition and deprivation.

Endemic under-nutrition is silent killer. It is a less obvious and less loud phenomenon
than state of absolute starvation. Though it kills many more people in long run, but does
not get dramatic media attention. Women and children tend to be the worst victim of
under-nutrition, as they get, due to their precarious position in household, less share of
food than what they need physiologically, and permit this trend willingly to favour men
members of their family. According to a latest UNICEF report, ‘an estimated 423,000
children under five years of age die every year in Pakistan, and these deaths may be
prevented with (among other things) good nutrition for their mothers’. Under-nutrition
resulting from the shockwave of inflation would add more to this number of preventable
deaths.

In addition, the worst form of deprivation that current crisis leads to is failure of having
freedom to the right to education. Poor tends to save family from starvation through
engaging school-age children in cheap labour. This arrangement would further deteriorate
to a situation, in which, according to ILO, ‘some 3.3 million children, aged between 5
to14 years, are engaged in child labour’. These working children have never been
enrolled or dropped out of school before completing their elementary education.

At a time, when the notion of human security is increasingly becoming dependable on

perception of values as imparted through education, or for that matter lack of education,
this generation of ‘deprivation and denials’ deserve special focus. The state can not afford
now to abandon the children of lesser gods in doom and gloom while creating models of
excellence for privileged ones. So far, elite-friendly fiscal policies have denied working
space to poor and thereby have led to widespread sense of dejection and depression. This
is time to restore back their confidence and participation in economic and social
activities. Growth as such is not a dependable strategy for enhancing elementary
wellbeing and capability. If it is to serve as a solid basis for promoting living conditions,
Jean Dreze, the renowned economist says, ‘it must take a participatory form and
substantial part of resources made available by economic growth has to be devoted to the
expansion of public provisioning’.

There are even examples of remarkable success in health, nutrition and education
provisions in the difficult periods following the worst disasters of world. During Second
World War, even though the per capita availability of food fell significantly in Britain,
cases of under-nutrition also declined sharply, and extreme undernourishment almost
entirely disappeared. Explaining the policy behind such success, J.M. Winter, writes in
The Great War and the British People, ‘there were remarkable developments in social
attitudes about ‘sharing’ – sharing of heath care, subsidized nutrition and education, and
public policies aimed at achieving that sharing.’ Do we have courage to adapt such social
attitude of ‘sharing’ in this era of modernization?

In last two decades, countries like China, Cuba, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica and Jamaica
embarked on expanded programs of public health services, educational facilities, food
subsidies, employment generation, land distribution, income supplementation, and social
assistance. They all now have impressive records of achievements in removing under-
nutrition and deprivation of human capabilities.

It is time for us to concede that neither ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy’ (PRS), nor ‘Second
Generation of Reforms’ have succeeded in protecting and promoting our people’s basic
entitlements to food, elementary health and education. We, therefore, need a major shift
of strategy from growth-ambitious-targets to social and economic security of common
masses. The next budget offers good opportunity to initiate such a process of
transformation.

The writer is a development professional and can be reached at nsamoo@gmail.com.