The politics of hunger.

Byline: Muhammad Amir Rana

THE current government seems to have a very simplistic idea of the welfare state. Its much-trumpeted slogan of 'change', which the government keeps infusing with religious narratives, utopian dogmas and mantras, also appears to be merely for public consumption.

The Ehsaas-Saylani Langar Scheme is yet another reflection of the government's obsession with showcasing something 'big' to reflect 'change'. Addressing the inaugural ceremony of the scheme, Prime Minister Imran Khan protested against the people's criticism of his vision of the state of Madina, which he said 'could not be realised in only 13 months'.

Read: PM Imran launches Ehsaas-Saylani Langar Scheme in Islamabad

There is nothing new in the prime minister's complaint regarding this criticism or even in his approach to poverty alleviation. Many countries in the developing world, especially Pakistan, have been trapped in flawed plans aimed at poverty reduction.

Just a week after the launch of the langar, or free kitchen, scheme, an economist of Indian-origin, Abhijit Banerjee, and his French-born wife, Esther Duflo, along with another economist Michael Kremer, won the Nobel Prize for their experimental approach towards alleviating global poverty. Their landmark work, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, challenges conventional approaches to poverty alleviation and examines the real nature of the issue, and also how the poor react to incentives.

Giving more food or money to the poor is not a remedy for the curse of poverty.

The experts spent time in the field, living with the poor in 18 countries, to find that developing countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor, or because they have had an unfortunate history, but that these nations need to fight ignorance, ideology and inertia. Their work should be essential reading for the prime minister and his socioeconomic managers and policymakers. It will help them understand that giving more food or money to the poor is not the remedy for the curse of poverty.

Allama Iqbal wrote an introduction to a book on economics in 1904. The preface provides an interesting assessment of the viewpoints of Muslims on economics, still relevant to some extent in Pakistan's context. Challenging the dominant view of his time, Iqbal argued that the knowledge of wealth did not make nations greedy but was meant to make them capable of controlling their ambitions of war to be able to...

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