PAKISTAN increasingly functions as two parallel societies. One purchases solutions from the private market whenever public institutions fail. The other remains dependent on the very institutions that have deteriorated through decades of neglect. They share the same constitution, the same laws and the same national identity, but their daily experience of citizenship is fundamentally different. The most consequential divide in Pakistan today is not between provinces, ethnicities or even income groups. It is between those who can exit failing public systems and those who cannot.

Call it the great secession. Over the past two decades, a substantial and growing portion of Pakistan’s population, not only the wealthy but the anxious middle class, has quietly with-drawn from public provision. Their children attend private schools. Their families seek treatment in private hospitals or travel abroad for serious illness. Their neighbourhoods are gated, their water is bottled, their electricity is backed by generators or solar panels, their security is contracted. When the state fails to deliver and it fails reliably, they do not protest. They purchase a substitute. And each time they do, they move a little further from any stake in whether public institutions ever improve. The exit is rational at the individual level. At the national level, it is catastrophic.

The numbers make the scale of this visible. Pakistan spends just 0.8 percent of GDP........

© Pakistan Observer