Interview with Kaisar Bengali

Both poverty and inequality vary across regions and provinces in Pakistan. Why the country has not succeeded to reduce poverty, especially in rural areas, on consistent basis? There have been no dearth of programmes, projects and schemes, domestically and donor funded, over the last 7 decades. Yet, inequality has widened and poverty has increased. All statistics to the contrary are just statistics. Apart from poverty, there has been no perceptible improvement in literacy, enrolment, maternal, child and infant mortality, malnutrition indicators, and so on. Decent housing is unavailable for the poor, water quality is deficient, and there is no difference in how the poor and cattle are transported. Lack of positive results on all fronts can only be attributed to the fact that human and social development has never been the objective of the state.