The Pakistani Spectator

According to a renowned dictionary, disparities in education lead to shortages of skilled workers and educated managers in developing countries. An unskilled workforce is less productive and receives lower wages. Lower wages, in turn, encourage highly educated workers in these countries to migrate to industrialized countries to earn higher salaries. This migration, known as the brain drain, increases the scarcity of educated and skilled workers in developing countries. Migration of people as a phenomenon differs from country to country and from time to time. Migration from less developed countries (LDCs) may be due to several different sets of underlying social, political and economic forces. Brain drain represents the defected transfer of resources spent on imparting education and nurturing technical skills of the drained brain in question by the parent country (DCs) to the country of the transfer. The developed nations concerned saves her pounds and dollars on professional education and training and in the process obtains the services of trained doctors, engineers etc who earn very much more than their native counter parts and have more comfortable styles of living.

According to CIA world fact book, our net migration rate is -3.13 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2009 est.), comparison to the world 145th out of 180 entities. Pakistan is behind in the region only to known countries like Nepal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Maldives. While our counterpart India, having -0.05 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2009 est.) comparison to the world 85th is far behind us. So in this regard we have defeated our rivals! Most of the immigrants are well educated personals like medical professionals, engineers, educationalists, bureaucrats, businessmen, young students etc.

The main crux of the matter is that emigrants as they enter developed countries are often in the most productive phase of his professional life, mostly young and energetic and by the time they returns back, if they do, they are often spent force with wrong ideas not suited even for Pakistan.

When we take it as a political problem, so we can say that as the best of professional manpower leaving Pakistan and settling in a more developed one like US, Europe and Middle East, it is a political phenomenon, but it only rarely occurs that the motives are exclusively political. It involves peculiar contradiction; it simultaneously indicates the lack of production and over production of professional manpower on our institutions. In addition to this terrorism and counter terrorism conditions, law and order situation, crisis of basic needs like water, electricity, sugar, energy etc are basically leading to political and socioeconomically turmoil of our stability leading to the emerging trends for journeys to foreign embassies.

The economic aspect of brain drain cannot be separated from the political aspect. First of all, it should be emphasized that it is in contradiction with the great international economic and political objective, namely the narrowing of the gap between the developed and the under developed countries. It expresses at the same time the complexity and the inter-dependence of different societies; it derives from disproportionate economic, technological and scientific development of the developed and the developing countries, entailing contradiction in the training of professional manpower and ability to satisfy the several demands for this group. It is characteristic of brain drain that the more underdeveloped a country is economically, the more it loses by brain drain while only developed countries profit from the process. It occurs through a complicated interplay of direct and indirect economic `push’ and `pull’ factors. It is stimulated by the lack of an educational system as well as the absence of a manpower policy. These deficiencies normally hindering the really efficient use of those qualified as well as those having talent.

We Pakis are so deficient in these departments that we can’t cope with it easily. As against this, there are higher living standards and better research and working opportunities of the more developed countries, which provide thousands of possibilities for developing human potential.

We have to think over it seriously and should go for the solution for this undermined riddle. My humbly request to the society leaders is to set standards for the basic needs of people and to establish institutions regarding long term future planning for the society demands and abilities and  to take steps for improvement of living standards, otherwise there will be blood only.