Pakistan’s unemployment crisis is no accident of fate. It is not the result of global headwinds or temporary shocks. It is a direct, predictable, and manufactured outcome—the consequence of deliberate policy choices made year after year.

This is not a system in distress. It is a system working exactly as designed: protecting rent-seekers, incumbents over innovators, and inertia over reform.

The fiction of the figures:

The state continues to peddle a comforting unemployment rate of 7 percent. Yet, according to Dr Hafeez Pasha, the real figure is closer to 22 percent. The ground reality is far grimmer: 8–9 million Pakistanis are openly unemployed. 15–18 million are underemployed, trapped in low-productivity, informal work. Over 2.2 million youth enter the labour force every year. GDP growth of 2.5–3.5 percent absorbs barely half of them.

This is not a temporary mismatch. It is a permanent and expanding backlog of wasted human potential, willfully ignored by the state.

A catalogue of failure:

This crisis is not abstract. It is institutional, engineered across seven key pillars of the state each playing its role in a carefully choreographed symphony of........

© Business Recorder