It is a paradox both painful and persistent: Pakistan has learned to survive without progressing. For decades, the country has chased the illusion of growth while its people— its real wealth— have remained trapped in deprivation. Skyscrapers rise where schools decay, budgets expand where capabilities shrink, and the rhetoric of reform continues to mask the rot beneath. In a nation that has mastered the language of resilience, it is the poverty of human development that tells the real story.
The latest UNDP Human Development Report 2025 lays bare this uncomfortable truth. Pakistan’s Human Development Index stands at 0.544, ranking 168th out of 193 nations, barely above countries emerging from conflict. Once considered a promising mid-tier state in South Asia, Pakistan now languishes in the low human development bracket. The HDI adjusted for inequality plunges further to 0.364, reflecting how deeply unequal and exclusionary our growth model has become. The irony is tragic: while the state celebrates economic recovery, its citizens experience a decline in dignity.
These are not just numbers. They are the quiet arithmetic of neglect. Behind every fraction lies a child who drops out of school, a mother who dies giving birth, a graduate who cannot find work, or a citizen who cannot afford medicine. Life expectancy at 67.6 years, expected years of schooling at 7.9, and mean years of schooling at 4.3— each statistic echoes a systemic failure to translate potential into progress. Even Gross National Income per capita, at barely US $5,501, underscores that Pakistan’s economy is not creating opportunity but merely absorbing survival.
The HDR’s global theme— “Breaking the Gridlock: Reimagining Cooperation in a Polarized World”— invites nations to rethink development models. Yet Pakistan’s crisis is not about global polarization; it is about domestic paralysis. The country’s human-development curve has flatlined for nearly a decade, its institutions fatigued, its governance incoherent, and its social investment threadbare. Growth, in Pakistan’s model, has become a spectacle that bypasses people.
The World Bank’s latest country diagnostics echo the same dismay. Urbanisation, often a marker of progress, has turned chaotic. Pakistan’s cities— meant to be engines of innovation— are now choking under collapsing infrastructure, housing shortages, and polluted air. Karachi and Lahore, the supposed nerve centres of progress, have become metaphors for dysfunction: water-starved, overcrowded, and unevenly governed. Urban sprawl without planning is not development— it is decay at scale. The failure to invest in urban management has not just bred inefficiency but has also deepened inequality, segregating the privileged from the abandoned.
The IMF’s 2025 review paints an equally sobering picture. Between 2000 and 2022, Pakistan’s per-capita GDP growth averaged just 1.9 percent annually, compared to India’s 4.9 percent and Bangladesh’s 4.5 percent. This disparity is not about luck; it is about leadership. The IMF attributes the stagnation to “weak contributions from human and physical capital and declining productivity.” Simply put, Pakistan has built an economy without building its people. Productivity has fallen, governance has fractured, and fiscal cycles keep repeating in a grim loop of bailout and breakdown.
The constitutional devolution that followed the 18th Amendment was supposed to democratize governance. Instead, it fractured it. Provinces received powers without capacity; local governments were empowered on paper but starved in practice. Municipal authorities remain toothless, while provincial departments drown in red tape and turf wars. The result is governance in name, not in substance— laws enacted without enforcement, policies launched without follow-through, and institutions existing more as symbols than systems.
For too long, Pakistan has measured its future in megawatts, motorways, and budget targets. The time has come to measure it in minds empowered, lives lengthened, and opportunities expanded. The Human Development Index of 0.544 is not just a ranking— it is a mirror. Whether Pakistan chooses to confront that reflection or continue averting its gaze will determine if this paradox endures— or ends.
Nowhere is this dysfunction more visible than in education— the very spine of human development. Pakistan’s universities have fallen off the world’s academic radar. The Times Higher Education rankings for 2025 feature only a handful of Pakistani institutions, most placed in the lower tiers. Outdated curricula, rote learning, and bureaucratic leadership have suffocated intellectual growth. The Higher Education Commission itself laments the poor research output and disconnect between academia and industry. The tragedy is not that our universities produce less knowledge, but that they produce less relevance. In a century defined by data, innovation, and AI, Pakistan’s education system continues to prepare students for a world that no longer exists.
Meanwhile, the global technological revolution is rewriting what human development means. The HDR 2025 underscores digital transformation and artificial intelligence as the next frontiers of human progress. Yet Pakistan’s pace remains glacial. Our digital infrastructure has expanded, but digital literacy, research capacity, and policy coherence lag woefully behind. While regional peers integrate AI into public services, Pakistan remains trapped in bureaucratic inertia and outdated thinking. This technological stagnation is not a luxury of delay— it is a loss of relevance.
Economic fragility continues to bleed into social despair. Health and education— core HDI pillars— receive a combined allocation of barely three percent of GDP. Even that meagre sum suffers from leakage, inefficiency, and politicisation. The World Bank’s 2025 Human Capital Review notes that Pakistan ranks among the bottom ten globally in public investment efficiency. Climate disasters compound the misery: the 2022 floods wiped out livelihoods, infrastructure, and years of social progress. The HDR’s observation that “climate injustice and inequality now intersect” finds its sharpest expression here— where the poorest pay the highest cost for the failures of the powerful.
What binds these failures together is a mindset that mistakes statistics for strategy. Pakistan continues to measure success in GDP figures while ignoring the hollowing of its human foundations. Countries once far behind— Vietnam, Rwanda, and even Ethiopia— have leapfrogged ahead by placing people, not projects, at the centre of policy. Their lesson is simple: human development is not a byproduct of growth; it is its precondition.
If Pakistan is to escape its paradox, it must dismantle this illusion of progress. It must invest in human capability as the true currency of development— rebuilding education, reforming health, restoring local governance, and reclaiming trust in institutions. It must reimagine its universities as laboratories of innovation, not factories of degrees. It must treat cities as living systems that demand management, not extraction. And it must align fiscal policy with social purpose— making growth serve people, not privilege.
For too long, Pakistan has measured its future in megawatts, motorways, and budget targets. The time has come to measure it in minds empowered, lives lengthened, and opportunities expanded. The Human Development Index of 0.544 is not just a ranking— it is a mirror. Whether Pakistan chooses to confront that reflection or continue averting its gaze will determine if this paradox endures— or ends.
