EDITORIAL: The recent survey of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) that measured the socioeconomic impact of the coronavirus on the people has proved Prime Minister Imran Khan correct since its data has revealed that daily wagers or ‘own account workers’ especially in non-agriculture sectors were most affected by it. The fate of daily wagers has become one of the most important features of policy-making in the Covid era. This is understandably more of a third world problem since, for some reason, poor countries tend to have much larger populations, most of them usually quite poor. For rich countries it’s one thing to lock everything down to keep the virus from spreading and then expect everybody to adjust – either work from home or live off savings till things get better – but it’s a different thing altogether in developing countries. Here, as Prime Minister Imran Khan visualized, such measures can amount to immediately cutting off the food supply of a very large part of the country’s population. Then a significant part of already meagre resources would have to be spent on a section of the population that doesn’t contribute to them. Otherwise situations like these can lead to things like rioting, even starvation and deaths, because it’s difficult to trim costs when the only expenditure of a lot of families is purely food-related. Take their daily wages and they will be staring certain death in the face in a matter of days.
It’s for such reasons that international institutions like the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned at the beginning of the pandemic that it could even lead to ‘famines of biblical proportions’ if the poor are not properly looked after. And now a strengthening second wave, not to mention the new, faster spreading variant of Covid-19, must be giving sleepless nights to leaders in countries like India and some in South America, because their economies have collapsed. Pakistan did better than almost all other countries after running into something of a scare early in the first wave. But now we, too, are being overtaken by the second wave. And the new strain of the virus has also made it to our shores. The PM has, quite wisely, ruled out a complete lockdown once again not just because the government doesn’t have enough money to keep the economy solvent like last time, but also because he does not want to subject the most vulnerable sections of our country to such a fate. Yet, as the experience of countries like the United Kingdom (UK) has shown, a time could well come when authorities no longer have a choice in the matter.
Hopefully, that will not happen, but it is still the government’s responsibility to have a fallback plan if it does. It’s a good thing that it now has the advantage of the detailed PBS data, which will give it a very good idea of how different segments of society and sectors of the economy responded to all its measures last summer. It was able to adjust very quickly and overcome all sorts of obstacles back then. There’s no reason for it not to be able to do the same thing again. Of course, ordinary Pakistanis can do both the government and poorer sections of society a huge favour by following all safety protocols very responsibly and ensuring that the virus doesn’t spread any further than it has to.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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