Sindh and Balochistan have been determined to be the most neglected federative units in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI).

Below is an article published by The News (International):

The Centre has found that Balochistan and Sindh, the most neglected federating units in terms of Human Development Index (HDI), will ultimately cause inclusion of backwardness as an indicator for multiple criteria for finalising the NFC Award.

The inclusion of backwardness into the multiple criteria will pave the way for transferring more resources towards these two federating units in the forthcoming NFC Award.The deliberations for the National Finance Commission (NFC) are under way to finalise vertical and horizontal distribution of financial resources. It has been decided that the distribution of resources under the Federal Divisible Pool (FDP) will be made on the basis of multiple criteria but now the provinces will have to evolve a consensus on exact weightage given to each criterion for each of the criterion within the multiple factors.

On the request of the Finance Ministry, a special presentation was prepared called ‘A Brief on HDI by Provinces’ by taking into account four sectors, including education index, health index, facility index and economy index, a copy of which is exclusively available with The News states that the overall HDI for Pakistan stands at 0.561, which by international standards, falls in the category of countries with the Medium Human Development.

The HDI (0.561) for 2006-07 when compared with HDI computed by the UN for 2005 for Pakistan (0.0551) indicates a slight increase of 1.8 per cent. With HDI of 0.551, Pakistan stands at 136th position out of the total 177 countries in accordance with the UN Human Development Report 2007-08.

The findings state province wise analysis indicates that the HDI 0.602 in the Punjab stands first and it is even 7.3 per cent above the national HDI, followed by the NWFP with 0.563 that is almost equal to national average.

Sindh’s HDI stands at 0.507 and Balochistan’s at 0.443, which shows that the province of Balochistan is the most backward province in terms of HDI. “Balochistan is almost 21 per cent below the national average while Sindh is below the national average by 10 per cent,” the report added.

The analysis by sector wise indexes for the provinces indicates that the Punjab is leading in all the sectors among the four provinces, except for the economy index, for which the Punjab stands second, Sindh remains below as compared to the Punjab and the NWFP in all other sectors except for education, where its performance is slightly better than the NWFP and Balochistan, however, far below as compared to the Punjab. The NWFP has done well compared to Sindh and Balochistan in almost all sectors, however, marginally below in education by Sindh but surprisingly the NWFP is above all the provinces in economy index.

Balochistan is far below in almost all sectors, except for the economy index where it stands after the NWFP. The details of sector wise analysis show that the national education index stands at 0.768 while it is 0.839 in the Punjab, 0.695 in Sindh, 0.693 in the NWFP and 0.591 in Balochistan.

The report states that Punjab is better among all the provinces in both Adult Literacy Rate (ALR) and Gross Enrolment Rate (GER) and also above the national average. Sindh is better than the NWFP and Balochistan in ALR, the NWFP is better than Sindh and Balochistan in GER.