Pakistan's Growing Human Capital

[Dushmann]

Here's a piece by Thane Richard, a Brown University student who did a semester abroad at St. Stephens College in India:

“Wait, what?! You are studying here for three years just so you can go do it again for four more years?” I could not grasp the logic of this. What changed my understanding was when I started taking classes at St. Stephen’s College. Except for one, they were horrible.
This was not an isolated incident — all my fellow exchange students concurred that the academics were a joke compared to what we were used to back home. In one economic history class the professor would enter the room, take attendance, open his notebook, and begin reading. He would read his notes word for word while we, his students, copied these notes word for word until the bell sounded. Next class he would find the spot where the bell had interrupted him, like a storyteller reading to children and trying to recall where he had last put down the story. He would even pause slightly at the end of a long sentence to give us enough time to finish writing before he moved on. And this was only when he decided to show up — many times I arrived on campus to find class abruptly cancelled. Classmates exchanged cell phone numbers and created phone trees just to circulate word of a cancelled class. I got a text almost daily about one of my classes. My foreigner peers had many similar experiences.
---------------
To pause for a moment, here is the problem with me talking about this topic: right now many Indians reading this are starting to feel defensive. “Nationalist” is a term I have heard as a self-description as they defend Mother India from the bigoted, criticising foreigner. They focus on me rather than the problem. I have had people unfriend me on Facebook and walk out on meals because I politely expressed an opinion on politics or history that went against the publicly consented “Indian opinion.” For a nation that prides itself on the 17 languages printed on its currency, I am greeted with remarkable intolerance. Even after living in India for close to three years, attending an Indian college, working for an Indian company, founding an Indian company, paying taxes in India, and making India my home, I am not Indian enough to speak my mind. But in a nation that rivals all others in the breadth of its human diversity, who is Indian enough? Because if loyalty and a feeling of patriotism were the barometers for “Indianness,” rather than skin colour or a government document, then I would easily be a dual U.S.-Indian citizen. This Indian defensiveness is false nationalism. It is not a stance that cares about India, it is one that cares about what others think of India, which is not nationalism. That is narcissism.
My voice should be drowned out by the millions around me who are disappointed with how they have been short-changed by the Indian government — their government. Education is one of the most poignant examples of this and serves as great dinner conversation amongst the elite:
“The Indian education system is lost in the past and failing India.” Everyone at the table nods, mumbles their concurrence, and cites the most recent Economist article or Pricewaterhouse Cooper study on the matter in order to masquerade as informed....

An Indian education? - The Hindu

 

[Koovie]

Hahaha laughed so hard

 

[RiazHaq]

Here's an NDTV report today:

Of every 100 new-borns that die in the world, 29 are in India. In real, heart-rending numbers that is three lakh babies who die on the day they are born, every year.

Infants fare better even in Pakistan and Bangladesh, says a new report.

Non-governmental organisation Save the Children compared first-day deaths in 186 countries for its "State of World's Mother Report". Luxembourg has the least new-born deaths, India the most, the reports says.

While infant deaths in India have come down by almost half compared to 1990, the rate has been slower than that in, say, Nepal.

The statistics only get worse. More than half the child deaths in India happen in the first month. And India has the biggest disparity between the rich and poor in child deaths.

The country's report card on mother and child health too is abysmal; India is behind Pakistan and Bangladesh on this list.

Most new-born deaths in India, says report; Pakistan, Bangladesh fare better | NDTV.com

 

[Vinod2070]

Najam Sethi on different course taken by India & Pakistan after Independence.

Najam Sethi on different course taken by India & Pakistan after Independence- 1/3 - YouTube

Interesting video from someone who knows.

India - Emerging Model State Vs Pakistan - Failed State - YouTube

Najam Sethi Truth About Pakistan.flv - YouTube

Hum hain bhukhe nange!

Another tight slap on the face of the lying scavengers.

 

[RiazHaq]

Opinions are no substitute for hard data.

Indian poverty levels higher than Pakistan's, says UN report - Telegraph

http://www.fi.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/In-the-News-2013/UNDP_India_in_the_news_1503201303.pdf

Haq's Musings: New Index Finds Indians Poorer Than Africans and Pakistanis

Did you know that India’s healthcare parameters are worse than Pakistan’s ? | Healthcare In India

http://www.defence.pk/forums/social...se-than-pakistan-bangladesh-food-hygiene.html

Pak, Lanka better than India on hunger index | India Environment Portal

 

[Vinod2070]

This thread is an example of what a perverse and obscene reward system can do to people.

The OP has dropped even the pretension that it ever had anything to do with "Pakistan's Growing Human Capital".

Till the time this kind of bigotry, "chhoti soch" and hatred taking over basic humanity and love for one's own people continues, you will see Pakistan remain a quivering toxic jelly state that M J Akbar has so poignantly described it to be.

The roots lie in the conditions of partition and the conditioning of the people thereafter.

It's sad to see the wastage of life like this. Humanity has a long way to go to become human in some parts.

 

[soccerhero]

You are still living in your past glory Riaz.

Poverty in Pakistan

At one time, not so very long ago, a Pakistani could proudly say, while drawing a comparison with India where millions slept hungry at night, that no-one in his country went to bed with an empty stomach. No more, alas! The spiraling rise in the prices of goods of daily use, on the one hand, and the static incomes on the other have combined to spread hunger, which now affects a large segment of our society. And if one were to add the growing incidence of unemployment caused by inflationary pressures, the picture would become starker. According to some reports, as many as 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. The economic realities are driving even the middle classes into cutting corners.

Prolonged and unpredictable load shedding of gas and electricity is resulting in the closure of factories or at least reduced working hours. The industrialists are left with no choice but to make drastic cuts in their workforce that is making for large-scale unemployment. The end result is that the section of the population that was at least living from hand to mouth has to suffer the pangs of hunger and privation.
The notion that Pakistan is a poor country is highly misleading. The pity is that it resource-rich, but these resources are either being plundered by the powerful and the influential, or not being properly exploited. A democratic order, on the contrary, stipulates that the resources of the country are used for the benefit of the people. Most governments failed to live up to their commitments of serving the people, even though they functioned under the tile of democratic governments.
Corruption seems to have become a by-word for the country. If somehow corruption could be rooted out from society and we have the privilege of having people-friendly rulers, it would surprise many how quickly Pakistan would scale the heights of development.
Poverty does not come in drizzles. It brings with it a downpour of ills; for, after all money matters. The hordes of beggars on the roads and roaming the streets and asking for alms testify that they are short of money to make both ends meet. It is a pathetic sight and a disgrace to the fair name of the country.
The lack of funds also leads to ill health since Pakistan is not a welfare state where health services are free for the poor. It is a sad reality that the country was envisioned by Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah to become a welfare state. However, the rulers that followed him had the aim of self-enrichment in mind when they stepped into the seat of power; yes, there were some notable exceptions but they were too few to make a difference.
Another vital input to realizing the dream of a progressing and prosperous land is high-quality education available at all levels and to all and sundry. The conditions of state-run educational institutions, with exceptions few and far between, beggar description. Unfortunately, the poor have no other choice but to send their children to these schools because they cannot afford the exorbitant fees private educational institutions charge. Thus, the quality of product of government schools hardly needs to be described. The graduates of these colleges have nothing to look up to. They are ill equipped to find a job with a decent salary. Not only lack of proper education causes the population to increase at phenomenal rates, adding more to the lot of the poor, uneducated and untrained. And in the present knowledge economy they simply would not fit in.
One can write a full thesis on the consequences of poverty. But for a columnist it would suffice to bring out those issues that hold the key to getting out of the vicious circle of poverty.

Poverty in Pakistan

 

[Vinod2070]

At one time, not so very long ago, a Pakistani could proudly say, while drawing a comparison with India where millions slept hungry at night, that no-one in his country went to bed with an empty stomach. No more, alas! The spiraling rise in the prices of goods of daily use, on the one hand, and the static incomes on the other have combined to spread hunger, which now affects a large segment of our society. And if one were to add the growing incidence of unemployment caused by inflationary pressures, the picture would become starker. According to some reports, as many as 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. The economic realities are driving even the middle classes into cutting corners.

Fact is, it was never true! Never ever.

People tend to romanticize the past. Forgetting the miseries and remembering only what they want to.

 

[Vinod2070]

One interesting thing for us is that we see it as a case of:

Tu kaun main khwamkhwah

We have just nothing to do with Pakistan. We don't benchmark against them and feel it insulting to be bracketed with them.

The Af-Pak thing is here to stay.

The same people? Surely not - Hindustan Times

Few things annoy me as much as the claim often advanced by well-meaning but woolly- headed (and usually Punjabi) liberals to the effect that when it comes to India and Pakistan, "We’re all the same people, yaar." This may have been true once upon a time. Before 1947, Pakistan was part of undivided India and you could claim that Punjabis from West Punjab (what is now Pakistan) were as Indian as, say, Tamils from Madras.

But time has a way of moving on. And while the gap between our Punjabis (from east Punjab which is now the only Punjab left in India) and our Tamils may actually have narrowed, thanks to improved communications, shared popular culture and greater physical mobility, the gap between Indians and Pakistanis has now widened to the extent that we are no longer the same people in any significant sense.

It's funny seem them obsessing with us rather than their own Ummah.

 

[Contrarian]

Fact is, it was never true! Never ever.

People tend to romanticize the past. Forgetting the miseries and remembering only what they want to.

Pakistan never had the kind of dire, desperate poverty that India had either.
India has improved but our pace is slowing down again.

 

[RiazHaq]

India leads the world in dengue, reports The Hindu:

Dengue, the world’s most rapidly spreading mosquito-borne viral disease, is taking a far bigger human toll than was believed to be the case. As many as 390 million people across the globe could be falling victim to the virus each year, according to a multinational study published by Nature on Sunday.

India emerges in the analysis as the country with the world’s highest dengue burden, with about 34 per cent of all such cases occurring here.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), incidence of dengue has shot up 30 fold in the past 50 years. Its estimate has been that globally there were 50-100 million dengue infections taking place annually.

For their study, Samir Bhatt at the University of Oxford and his colleagues used a map-based approach to model how many dengue cases were occurring in various parts of the world, thereby capturing its global distribution.

They estimated that worldwide, 96 million people suffered each year from ‘apparent infections’ where the disease was severe enough to disrupt an individual’s regular routine. In addition, there were 294 million asymptomatic infections.

With “large swathes of densely populated regions coinciding with very high suitability for disease transmission,” Asia bore 70 per cent of the apparent infections that took place, the scientists pointed out in the paper.

Africa contributed about 16 per cent of the global dengue infections and the Americas 14 per cent.

“I consider it to be the most comprehensive study of dengue disease burden to date,” said Duane J. Gubler, an internationally known expert on the disease, when asked for his views on the Nature paper.

The study’s estimate of 390 million infections was “much closer to the actual figure than the 50 million WHO is still using,” observed Professor Gubler, who is now with the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore.

“Considering that mosquito control has failed in all dengue-endemic countries, that over half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and that dengue is an urban disease, even that number may be too low,” he said in an e-mail.

The study estimated that India had the largest number of dengue cases, with about 33 million apparent and another 100 million asymptomatic infections occurring annually.

However “these are estimates and there are many gaps which we now need to fill,” cautioned Jeremy Farrar, a senior author of the study, in an e-mail. “But it would not surprise me that India was home to the most dengue [patients] globally.”

The model used in the study could help provide a framework to estimate the burden of disease. Inevitably, there were gaps in the data and one needed to extrapolate from other areas. Better data collection should be encouraged so that the estimates were as accurate as possible, said Professor Farrar, who is director of the Wellcome Trust Vietnam Research Programme and Oxford University Clinical Research Unit Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Vietnam.

“We have a tremendous problem of dengue all over India,” said Umesh C. Chaturvedi, agreeing with the finding of the paper. A virologist who has studied the disease, he is a scientific consultant to the Indian Council of Medical Research.

India leads the world in dengue burden: Nature - The Hindu

 

[RiazHaq]

Over 40% of all child marriages in the world take place in India, making it the child marriage capital of the world. Nearly half of all the Indian marriages involve a child bride, ranking it at number 11 among 68 nations where child marriages are reported. Child marriages account for nearly a quarter of all marriages in Pakistan, according to UNICEF.

Haq's Musings: India Leads the World in Child Marriages

India's rivers have been turned into open sewers by 638 million Indians without access to toilets, according to rural development minister Jairam Ramesh. He was reacting a UNICEF report that says Indians make up 58% of the world population which still practices open defection, and the sense of public hygiene in India is the worst in South Asia and the world.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2011/10/india-leads-world-in-open-defecation.html

 

[RiazHaq]

Here are some highlights from the book "Superfreakonomics" about India:

1. If women could choose their birthplace, India might not be a wise choice of a place for any of them to be born.

2. In spite of recent economic success and euphoria about India, the people of India remain excruciatingly poor.

3. Literacy is low, and corruption is high in India.

4. Only half the Indian households have electricity, and fewer have running water.

5. Only one in 4 Indian homes has a toilet.

6. 40% of families with girls want to have more children, but families with boys do not want a baby girl.

7. It's especially unlucky to be born female, baby boy is like a 401 K retirement plan, baby girl requires a dowry fund.

8. Smile Train in Chennai did cleft repair surgery at no cost for poor children. A man was asked how many children he had. He said he had 1, a boy. It turned out that he also had 5 daughters which he did not mention.

9. Indian midwives in Tamil Nadu are paid $2.50 to kill girls with cleft deformity.

10. Girls are highly undervalued, there are 35 million fewer females than males, presumed dead, killed by midwife or parent or starved to death. Unltrasound are used mainly to find and destroy female fetuses. Ultrasound and abortion are available even in the smallest villages with no electricity or clean water.

11. If lucky enough not to be aborted, girls face inequality and cruelty at every turn because of low social status of Indian women.

12. 51% of Indian men say wife beating is justified, 54% women agree, especially when dinner is burned or they leave home without husband's permission.

13. High number of unwanted pregnancies, STDs, HIV infections happen to Indian women when 15% of the condoms fail. Indian Council of Medical Research found that 60% of Indian men's genitalia are too small to fit the condoms manufactured to international standard sizes.

14. Indian laws to protect women are widely ignored. The government has tried monetary rewards to keep baby girls and supported microfinance for women. NGO programs, smaller condoms, and other projects have had limited success.

Haq's Musings: Superfreakonomics on Status of Indian Women

 

[Vinod2070]

Let me reiterate.

This thread is an example of what a perverse and obscene reward system can do to people.

The OP has dropped even the pretension that it ever had anything to do with "Pakistan's Growing Human Capital".

Till the time this kind of bigotry, "chhoti soch" and hatred taking over basic humanity and love for one's own people continues, you will see Pakistan remain a quivering toxic jelly state that M J Akbar has so poignantly described it to be.

The roots lie in the conditions of partition and the conditioning of the people thereafter.

It's sad to see the wastage of life like this. Humanity has a long way to go to become human in some parts.

 

[RiazHaq]

Let me reiterate.

Personal attacks are a confirmation that you have lost the argument.

It's time to reflect on what the former St. Stephen's student Thane Richard wrote in The Hindu:

To pause for a moment, here is the problem with me talking about this topic: right now many Indians reading this are starting to feel defensive. “Nationalist” is a term I have heard as a self-description as they defend Mother India from the bigoted, criticising foreigner. They focus on me rather than the problem. I have had people unfriend me on Facebook and walk out on meals because I politely expressed an opinion on politics or history that went against the publicly consented “Indian opinion.” For a nation that prides itself on the 17 languages printed on its currency, I am greeted with remarkable intolerance. Even after living in India for close to three years, attending an Indian college, working for an Indian company, founding an Indian company, paying taxes in India, and making India my home, I am not Indian enough to speak my mind. But in a nation that rivals all others in the breadth of its human diversity, who is Indian enough? Because if loyalty and a feeling of patriotism were the barometers for “Indianness,” rather than skin colour or a government document, then I would easily be a dual U.S.-Indian citizen. This Indian defensiveness is false nationalism. It is not a stance that cares about India, it is one that cares about what others think of India, which is not nationalism. That is narcissism.

My voice should be drowned out by the millions around me who are disappointed with how they have been short-changed by the Indian government — their government. Education is one of the most poignant examples of this and serves as great dinner conversation amongst the elite:

“The Indian education system is lost in the past and failing India.” Everyone at the table nods, mumbles their concurrence, and cites the most recent Economist article or Pricewaterhouse Cooper study on the matter in order to masquerade as informed.

“Yes, how sad.”

“Yes, how terrible.”

“Yes, India must fix this.”

Yet amongst my fellow Indian education alumni, I mostly hear a deafening silence when it comes to action. What is remarkable is that all students in India know what I am talking about. They know and are coping: Indian students are taking their useless Indian liberal arts degrees and going abroad to get real ones that signify a real education. A real education being one that challenges the intellect and questions paradigms, not one of rote memorisation and conformity. Or, as was the case with my Indian friends at Brown, they skip India altogether. Sure, I took some unimpressive classes at Brown and no curriculum is perfect, but Indian students should be demanding more. Much more.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/ed...ersity/an-indian-education/article4683622.ece