IN Pakistans scenario, where approximately two-thirds of the people live in rural areas, rural poverty is a major destabilising factor.

Authoritative studies have documented rising poverty levels with a decreased capacity to acquire and hold land which is the main source of subsistence in the agricultural areas. Nearly 67 per cent of Pakistans households are landless (though this cannot in itself be taken to be the sole denominator of poverty in the country). The problem is thrown into sharp relief when compared to the decline in Indias rural poverty levels between 1987 and 2000. The comparison is pertinent since both countries inherited a nearly identical system of land holdings and feudalism. India seems to have tackled the issues better than Pakistan which appears to have alternated between monetary policies dictated by the IMF and the World Bank and its own experiments with land reforms which proved unsuccessful. The income disparity between the haves and have-nots in Pakistan has also increased significantly while income disparity largely became an urban phenomenon during the period under review. Since the reasons behind the rise of radicalisation are multifarious, an analysis utilising any single variable would be empirical, not to mention misleading. Nevertheless, whenever socioeconomic factors spring up in debates, the relationship between rural poverty and radicalisation figures quite prominently. Rural poverty was going down in Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s but started increasing steadily during the 1990s. Although the methodologies and assumptions interpolated into the projection by a publicly funded Pakistani body are open to discussion, the poverty increase trend in the 1990s is alarming. The official notification points out that nearly 67 per cent of households owned no land at the time this study came out; 18.25 per cent households owned less than five acres of land; and 9.66 per cent owned between five and 12.5 acres, sufficient only to provide meagre levels of existence for sometimes large extended families that tend to rely on land as the sole source of income. The pattern is dismally skewed towards a few feudal families in possession of large land holdings; barely one per cent (0.64 per cent plus 0.37 per cent) of households owned over 35 acres.

Thus, the problem in Pakistan is not just low levels of land holdings but also highly unequal land distribution leading to a class of land haves and havenots. Strikingly, poverty levels tend to decrease in inverse proportion to landholdings, with poverty virtually disappearing with holdings of 55 acres and above. This indicates that poverty and landlessness are directly related to each other in Pakistans rural areas. In terms of the spatial distribution of landlessness, 86 per cent of the households in Sindh were landless (landless plus non-agricultural), followed by 78 per cent in Balochistan and 74 per cent in Punjab. The evidence of the income disparity rampant in Pakistani society is bolstered by statistics, with the Lorenz curve of 2001-02 for Pakistan lying below the 1984-85 levels. In economics, the Lorenz curve is often used to represent income distribution and can also be used to show the distribution of assets. This indicates that income distribution patterns have gradually worsened, resulting in higher income inequality in 2001-02 relative to 1984-85. Greater changes are visible in the higher part of the income distribution curves than in the middle and lower parts of the income brackets. This stipulates that during 2001-02, the upper income brackets registered a gain in income share to the richest 20 per cent at the expense of the poorest 20 per cent and middle 60 per cent. This increased poverty levels in the lower and middle brackets. This projection also indicates that the richest one per cent who used to get 10 per cent of the total income in 1984-85 was, in 2001-02, getting almost 20 per cent. It is estimated that in 1998-99, 30.6 per cent of Pakistanis were living below the poverty line. The estimate stands at 23.9 per cent in the period 2004-5, and according to official projections, dropped to 22.3 per cent by 2005-6. Rural poverty was estimated at 27 per cent in 2005-06, unfavourably comparing with an urban incidence of 13.1 per cent. The official surveys have, however, been criticised on the grounds of faulty methodologies and the padding of results. A World Bank survey put the figures of poverty incidence in Pakistan at 28.3 per cent in 2004-05, with income distribution patterns utilising the Gini coefficient yielding a figure of 0.3 in 200506 as compared to 0.27 in 2001-02. This indicates that there is a skewed income distribution pattern in favour of the high earners, which negates the

gains made in the eradication of absolute poverty by increasing income inequality. The overall poverty incidence was highest in Balochistan, with almost half the population living below the poverty line, with minimal difference between the poverty incidence in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. However, once the Sindh data was adjusted for the skewed data patterns for rural poverty obtained by the inclusion of Karachi by comparing rural Sindh with rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Sindh figures rose to 38 per cent of the rural population living under the poverty line as compared to 27 per cent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Punjab fared the best, with an overall poverty incidence of 26 per cent and, anomalously, a rural poverty incidence of just 24 per cent. This also implies that rural poverty was lower than average in both Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, which seems to militate against conventional wisdom and other studies. However, the problem is compounded once other variables such as lack of education, cultural and social paradigms are factored in, areas that need greater research in order to present a more meaningful picture of poverty in Pakistan.