No news is a good news, it is said rightly. A recent survey reveals that about 6 crore Pakistanis are living below poverty line. About four years back there used to be one poor person out of ten under a conservative estimate. Now that figure has risen to 3 out of 10 . About thirty percent of the country’s population is poor. This is not a good sign. It provides a proof, if any proof is necessary, that our successive rulers, whether they belonged to the Amy or to the class of politicians, failed miserably to address the bread and butter problem of the teeming millions of this country who continue to groan under abject poverty, who don’t have a roof of their own over their head, who languish in hospitals to die because they ill-afford costly Medicare which is beyond their reach and whose children cannot have an access to education and potable water because their pockets are empty.
The more this cleavage between the haves and the haves-not widens, the more hatred will spread in the heart of the poverty-stricken people of this country and that time is fast approaching when nobody would then be able to stem anarchy which always spread when extreme poverty grips a substantial population of any country.
The elections of 2018 are round the corner. There is a parliamentary democracy in the country. One would have expected that by this time they would circulate the blueprint of their election manifestos as to how are they going to tackle the economic, civic, administrative and social issues that confront the common man of this country. They should have, through seminars, and door-to-door contact with the man in the street sounded them out as to what actually they want?Based on the will and desire of the electorate they should have, by now, let it be known in writing the manner in which they are going to mitigate the woes that have made life miserable for the common man of this country.