We enter the New Year not with renewal, but with remembrance – remembrance of the same problems, the same pains, the same untold miseries that have stalked this land for decades. Time has moved forward, calendars have changed, and digits have been replaced, yet nothing fundamental has changed in the lived reality of the people. We transport ourselves into the New Year carrying all our past baggage – old wounds, festering injustices, and unfulfilled promises – still crying out for improvement, reforms, good governance, an end to cancerous corruption, and relief from elite capture that continues to destroy the very fabric of our society.
The illusion of change collapses when confronted with facts.
Our rulers peddle an official unemployment rate of around 7 percent, projecting an image of relative stability. Yet renowned and independent economists place real unemployment closer to 22 percent, exposing a massive gap between official narratives and lived reality. Each year, over 22 million young people enter the labour force, hopeful yet increasingly disillusioned, only to find shrinking opportunities and closed doors. This youth bulge, instead of becoming a demographic dividend, is fast turning into a social and economic time bomb.
Hunger, meanwhile, stalks millions. More than 8 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, unsure where their next meal will come from. Among children, the crisis is even more heartbreaking. Around 38 percent suffer from stunted growth, a permanent scar of malnutrition that impairs physical and cognitive development. These are not mere statistics; they are lifelong sentences imposed on innocence.
Education – the most powerful instrument of social mobility – stands in ruins. Shamefully, Pakistan has one of the lowest literacy rates in South Asia. Over 25 million children are out of school, while the Pakistan Institute of Education reports that around 20 million children have never attended school at all. Millions of these children, instead of spending their formative years learning, playing, and dreaming, are forced into garages, hotels, workshops, shops, and menial labour to support families crushed by poverty. Their stolen childhoods are the most damning indictment of our governance failures.
Healthcare paints an equally grim picture. Our health system is overwhelmed and under-resourced, struggling to cope with both communicable and non-communicable diseases. Public hospitals are massively flooded with ailing souls, lacking beds, medicines, equipment, and trained staff. The poor village women carrying the emaciated babies in their laps roam from pillar to post for the scarce medicines and absentee doctors. For the poor and have-nots, illness often becomes a death sentence or a descent into irreversible debt. Preventive healthcare remains neglected, while private care is prohibitively expensive, pushing medical treatment beyond the reach of the common citizen. The common man – the very soul and architect of Pakistan – remains trapped in a cycle of poverty, injustice and betrayal.
Infrastructure, the backbone of any functional state, is crippling and collapsing. Vast segments of the population still lack proper sanitation and sewage systems, living amid filth that breeds disease and indignity. Roads crumble, water systems fail, electricity remains unreliable, and urban planning is almost non-existent. These failures are not accidents; they are the result of years of neglect, corruption, and misplaced priorities.
Justice, too, remains elusive. Cases crawl through courts for years, even decades, making justice expensive, exhausting, and inaccessible for ordinary citizens. The poor suffer delays; the powerful exploit loopholes. At the grassroots, our police stations – the thanas – are often governed not by law, but by connections and currency, further eroding public trust in the state.
Inflation continues to perish and break the bones of the people, relentlessly eroding purchasing power and dignity. Even as official figures fluctuate, the cost of food, fuel, utilities, and basic necessities keeps ordinary families in a permanent state of anxiety. Survival itself has become a daily struggle.
And towering over all these crises is the mountain of debt. Better not to speak of it – yet we must. Billions are borrowed annually to build infrastructure and improve the lot of commoners – yet the lives of multitudes remain untouched by progress. Flood water turns towns and cities into lakes, yet the state services are visibly absent. Pakistan today stands drowning in debt of around Rs. 80.6 trillion, translating into a burden of approximately Rs. 318,252 on every citizen. Each passing day adds to these fetters, tightening the noose around the nation’s economic sovereignty. Debt servicing consumes resources that should have built schools, hospitals, and infrastructure, while wasteful administration and discretionary expenditures show no signs of austerity or restraint.
Most painfully, our public representatives, intoxicated by rhetoric, continue to raise their perks and privileges, even as they sermonize about reforms, good governance, ending elite capture, and curing the monster of corruption. The contradiction is glaring, the hypocrisy staggering. Why are we still here with birthday problems? Nations that rose from ashes – Germany, Japan, South Korea – stand as titans. Even Bangladesh once poorer out spaces us in growth. Let them think today to steer us out of crises and transport us to new year with new resolve and commitment to alleviate our suffering and festering problems of past years.
In such circumstances, we have little to cherish as we step into the New Year. We enter it with old stories, old scars, and a mountain of unresolved crises. Yet, despite everything, the people do not surrender hope. They carry a fragile but persistent optimism – the belief that the New Year might finally bring departure from destructive past practices and a genuine turn toward reform.
What the people seek is not charity, but justice. Not slogans, but structural change. They yearn for real efforts by those in power to pull the country out of debilitating poverty, staggering unemployment, crippling inflation, and drowning debt. They aspire to a future with quality education, decent employment, functioning healthcare, resilient infrastructure, better law and order, and above all, dignity, honour, and respect – the hallmarks of a civilized, independent, and honourable nation.
Only then will a New Year carry true fragrance – not merely of a changed digit, but of changed lives. Only then will the promise of a new horizon cease to be poetic rhetoric and become lived reality. Until that day, the people will continue to step into each New Year burdened, bruised, yet unbroken – still hoping that time will one day move not just forward, but towards justice.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is a Shikarpur-based retired civil servant. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the newspaper