By: Amna Hamid
Pakistan is going through a silent but catastrophic crisis. In 2023 alone, over 800,000 Pakistanis left the country for overseas employment, which will only continue to increase over the next several years. While migration has always been part of Pakistan’s economic story, the current wave is different in scale, composition, and consequence. Skilled categories such as healthcare, IT, and engineering are increasingly represented among recent migrants, particularly to OECD and Gulf healthcare systems. It is no longer a narrative of labour mobility or remittances. It is a story of gradual loss of human capital of the country, which is threatening the capabilities of the state to educate, heal, govern, and innovate.
Central to this crisis is a constant brain drain of young professionals, educated, skilled, in the form of doctors, nurses, engineers, academics, and technology professionals. Their exit is not just symbolic. It attacks the very base of the already fragile public institutions in Pakistan.
The official data tends to pool together all the emigrants concealing a significant reality. Although professional migrants make up a small percentage of the total number of migrants, their loss is disproportionately harmful. Professionals form less than 10 percent of total emigrants, but account for a much larger share of public service capacity loss. The depth of the public systems in Pakistan, healthcare, higher education, research, and governance, is low. When even a small number of trained professionals exit, the impact ripples through entire institutions.
The migration of a senior doctor does not merely decrease the number of physicians as Pakistan has around 1 doctor per 1000 people. It undermines teaching hospitals, curbs specialist education, and degrades mentorship of junior employees. Equally, when long-established academicians leave, the universities are left with few supervisors, researchers, and research outputs. Gradually, institutions become empty and are no longer able to develop the same talent that they lose. This is a vicious cycle; the weakening of institutions is encouraging more professionals to leave and this weakens the system they are leaving.
Public debate often reduces brain drain to inflation, unemployment, or political instability. While these matter, deeper structural factors are driving the exodus. One such factor is the collapse of career predictability. To most professionals, especially those in academia and the government, career advancement in Pakistan is unpredictable and obscured. Promotions are delayed, rules change midstream, and merit is frequently overshadowed by connections. In contrast, foreign systems are clear: they have set ladders, transparent grading, and schedules.
The other driver that is not well discussed is chronic underinvestment in institutions of knowledge. The budget of higher education has remained stagnant in the last couple of years, with repeated cuts in PSDP allocations. The development grants alongside research funding have also been cut several times. To the young researchers and scholars, this gives a clear signal: ambition does not have an institutional home. When doctoral scholarships dry up and laboratories remain underfunded, departure becomes a rational choice, not an emotional one.
In the technology sector, the crisis takes a subtler form. Many skilled professionals no longer need to physically migrate to exit Pakistan’s economy. Remote working, freelancing, and offshore incorporation allow talent to be physically present in one place and be economically and institutionally unlinked.
The issue of brain drain in Pakistan is not that of loyalty or patriotism. It is a crisis of governance and vision. Unless the state begins to value human capital as seriously as it values short-term financial survival, the departure lounge will remain Pakistan’s most efficient export zone. The question is no longer why people are leaving. It is how long the country can function if they keep doing so.
The unpredictability of the policies, uneven taxation and lack of understanding of the regulations have encouraged most of the technology experts to store income in foreign countries or have companies registered abroad. The consequence will be a form of virtual brain drain, skills stay on the one hand, economic value on the other. This undermines the tax foundation, negatively impacts reinvestment, and separates innovation and national development. Unlike traditional migration, this form of brain drain is harder to measure, and easier to ignore.
Nowhere is the contradiction more visible than in healthcare. Pakistan has been experiencing a long-term shortage of qualified nurses and specialized doctors especially in state hospitals and in the countryside. Pakistan already has fewer than one nurse per 1,000 people, far below WHO recommendations. Simultaneously, Pakistani nurses have become a popular export due to the global need of health care workers. Nurse migration is becoming a topic of policy discourse that is applying an economic opportunity perspective instead of a systemic risk perspective.
Although remittances are important, making healthcare workers export commodities is a painful proposition. Can a country with fragile health outcomes afford to optimize its workforce for foreign markets? And if it does, who will train, supervise, and replace those who leave? Devoid of a detailed workforce strategy, Pakistan will end up losing the internal capacity to get short-term financial relief.
Defenders of migration often point to remittances as compensation for talent loss. This argument is dangerously incomplete. Remittances bring in foreign exchange, but they do not teach the students, run the hospitals, design infrastructure, and reform institutions. State capacity relies on individuals, trained, experienced, and entrenched in systems.
Once those individuals are gone, an inflow of foreigners cannot compensate for the damage to the institutions. Successful countries that have used migration like India and China have done so together with long-term investment in local institutions. Pakistan has not.
Pakistan cannot find a solution to the brain drain by preventing the migration. It is to provide them with a reason to stay. To start with, the human-capital institutions have to be stabilized. Schools, academic hospitals and research institutes need regular funds, not occasional ones. The constant scholarship, research grants and training programmes are all indicators of seriousness to young professionals.
There should be transparency of career pathways as well. Retention tools like promotion are more effective when a predictable evaluation method is used and the promotion is made based on merit rather than as a salary increment alone. Consistency of policies is also important. Professionals require rules that do not change depending on the budget or administration whether in the healthcare field, education, or technology. Finally, retention must be treated as a national strategy, not an afterthought. Countries do not retain talent by accident; they do so by design.
Every young professional who leaves carries more than a passport and a degree. They carry the potential to teach, heal, innovate, and lead. When too many depart, the nation they leave is poorer, not only economically, but also institutionally and intellectually.
The issue of brain drain in Pakistan is not that of loyalty or patriotism. It is a crisis of governance and vision. Unless the state begins to value human capital as seriously as it values short-term financial survival, the departure lounge will remain Pakistan’s most efficient export zone. The question is no longer why people are leaving. It is how long the country can function if they keep doing so.
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