Let’s not sugarcoat it — Pakistan is a land of jarring contrasts. In one part of town, a billionaire is escorted in a bulletproof Land Cruiser. Across the bridge, a child rifles through garbage for dinner. And no, this isn’t just bad luck or a temporary dip in fortunes. This is by design.

We’ve been sold a story: that if GDP grows, the rising tide will lift all boats. But what if the boats are chained to the bottom while the yachts float higher? Dr Mahbubul Haq, the brilliant mind behind the Human Development Index, called this bluff long ago. He reminded us that real development isn’t about numbers — it’s about people. It’s about whether children go to school, whether mothers survive childbirth, and whether families eat more than once a day.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, once said that inequality isn’t just a moral issue — it’s a threat to economic stability. And he’s right. In Pakistan, we see the same story playing out every day. The top 1 percent hoards wealth while 40 percent of the population lives in multidimensional poverty.

Add to that a broken education system, crumbling hospitals, and a state that often behaves more like a gatekeeper than a service provider. You don’t need to crunch numbers to feel it — the anxiety in a working-class mother’s eyes says more than any economic report ever could. There’s a reason why the rich are building taller gates while the poor are digging deeper wells.

It’s not just the volume of poverty that’s alarming — it’s the architecture of inequality that makes it so resilient. This isn’t a temporary misstep; it’s a well-entrenched design. A tax system that punishes consumption but falls short of addressing direct taxation, a labour market where informal workers form the backbone but remain invisible in policymaking, and a state obsessed with optics over outcomes.

We’ve had enough of the Power Points; what we need........

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