Saturday, April 15, 2023

Pakistan is the Second Biggest Source of Foreign Doctors in US and UK

When US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke suffered a massive heart attack in 2010, the doctors who responded to this emergency were both foreign: one from India and the other from Pakistan. Dr. Farzad Najam, a graduate of King Edward Medical College in Lahore, was the chief heart surgeon at George Washington University Hospital at the time. Dr. Monica Mukherjee, a junior cardiologist at the hospital, assisted Dr. Najam in the operating theater. This episode illustrates the high profile presence of South Asian doctors in the United States. 

Doctor Brain Drain. Source: Statista

More recently, Dr. Mansoor Mohiuddin, a 1989 graduate of Karachi's Dow Medical College, made global headlines when he implanted a pig heart in a patient at University of Maryland School of Medicine. Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on transplanting animal organs, known as xenotransplantation, Muhammad M. Mohiuddin, MD, Professor of Surgery at UMSOM, joined the UMSOM faculty five years ago and established the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program with Dr. Griffith. Dr. Mohiuddin serves as the program’s Scientific/Program Director and Dr. Griffith as its Clinical Director.    

Top Countries of Origin of Foreign Doctors in the US. Source: OECD


The pervasive presence of South Asian doctors in the United States is confirmed by OECD (Organization for Cooperation and Development) statistics on foreign doctors in OECD member nations. While India has remained the top source of foreign doctors since 2013, Pakistan has moved up from third to second spot in this period.  As of 2016, there were  45,830 Indian doctors  and 12,454 Pakistani doctors among 215,630 foreign doctors in the United States. India (45,830) and Pakistan (12,454) are followed by Grenada (10,789), Philippines (10,217),  Dominica (9,974), Mexico (9,923), Canada (7,765), Dominican Republic (6,269), China (5,772), UAE (4,635) and Egypt (4,379). 

In percentage terms, 21% of foreign doctors come from India, 6% from Pakistan, 5% each from Grenada, Philippines and Dominica and 4% from Mexico.

Pie Chart of Origins of Foreign Medical Graduates in US. Source: OECD


Many of these "foreign doctors" are US citizens, born and raised in the United States, who travel abroad to study at foreign medical schools. Their reasons vary from ease of admissions to lower costs. This is particularly true of the medical schools  in the Caribbean nations.  

Many Caribbean nations have established medical schools to especially cater to the demand from the United States. In 2007, Pakistan, too, set up Dow International Medical College as part of Dow University of Health Science (DUHS). 

Indians and Pakistanis also make up the top two nationalities among 66,211 foreign doctors in the United Kingdom. There are 18,953 doctors from India, 8,026 from Pakistan, 4.880 from Nigeria and 4,471 from Egypt in the UK.

The list of 25,400 foreign doctors in Canada is topped by South Africans (2,604) followed by Indians (2,127), Irish (1,942), British (1,923), Americans (1,263) and Pakistanis (1,087). 

There are 25,607 Pakistani medical school graduates currently working in all of the OECD member countries which are considered the rich industrialized nations. These Pakistani doctors account for 10.6% of 242,000 Pakistan-trained doctors practicing now. 74,455 Indian doctors working in OECD nations make up 7.3% of about 1,020,000 of all India-trained doctors in practice. 

In spite of losing 10.6% of its doctors to "brain drain" compared to India's 7.3%, Pakistan still has more doctors per capita (1.1 per 1000 population) than India (0.7 doctors per 1000 population), according to the World Bank.  Pakistani medical colleges admit 16,000 students a year compared to 92,000 in India.

As the populations age and demand for medical services grows in the West, more and more of it is being met by recruiting health care workers, including doctors and nurses, from the developing world. 

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

South Asia Investor Review

Pakistani-American Health Professional Featured in Netflix Documentary "Pandemic"

Pakistan is the 3rd Largest Source of Foreign Doctors in America

Pakistani-Americans Largest Foreign-Born Muslim Group in Silicon Valley

Racial Slurs Hurled at Pakistani-American Doctor in St. Louis, Missouri

Islamophobia in America

Silicon Valley Pakistani-Americans

Pakistani-American Leads Silicon Valley's Top Incubator

Silicon Valley Pakistanis Enabling 2nd Machine Revolution

Pakistani-American Surgeon Implants Pig Heart in Human

Pakistani-American Ashar Aziz's Fire-eye Goes Public

Pakistani-American Doctor Honored By President Obama

Pakistani-American's Game-Changing Vision 

Minorities Are Majority in Silicon Valley 

Over A Million Pakistani University Students Enrolled in STEM Fields



48 comments:

Mohammad Asghar said...

Such a feat could have been performed only by a Christian or Hindu surgeon. Touching pig is haram in Islam. The question of a Muslim
surgeon touching the heart of a pig does not arise at all!

Riaz Haq said...

MA: "Touching pig is haram in Islam. The question of a Muslim surgeon touching the heart of a pig does not arise at all!"


Dr. Mohiuddin is a practicing Muslim. He believes it is acceptable to use pig organs if it helps save human life. Some Islamic scholars have ruled that it is prohibited to use pig for organ transplants. However, almost all research in the field of xenotransplantation is now carried out using pigs. Researchers say pigs are a preferred choice because they grow fast and the size of their organs is similar to that of humans. There is a worldwide shortage of organ donors. Successful use of genetically modified pig hearts and other organs will help save lives in the absence of human donors.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2022/01/pakistani-american-surgeontransplants.html

Anonymous said...

This is nothing to celebrate!

It takes lakhs for a government to train a mbbs only for him to emigrate as soon as he gets his degree.

This is not a tier 4 engineering college cyber coolie export which needs to be increased if possible but a real loss of desperately needed doctors.

Pakistan seems to be loosing a higher proportion of its qualified doctors than India though.Again nothing to celebrate at all.

Ahmed said...

Mr. Anonyoms

Pls note that America , Canada , Australia and UK are 1st world countries where hospitals have the best and international standard of medivial facilities and services . What the doctors of developing countries can learn in western countries during their profession you can’t expect that level of learning , experience and exposure that these doctors can get in the hospitals of their home country . After spending huge amount of their life and time in these western countries these medical professionals like surgeons and doctors gain so much knowledge , experience and exposure that they will be above the average doctors of Pakistan and India and they can return to their country and even work in the medical colleges and universities as medical professors in Pakistan and share their knowledge and expertise with the medical students in the country .

Ahmed said...

Dear Sir Riaz

Thanks for posting my comments medical field is not my profession neither I am interested in it but I can understand how the application of technology in the medical science can benefit not just the doctors , nurses and surgeons but it can also benefit the whole hospital and medical care centers .

Just imagine if their is an AI based robot in hospitals of Pakistan which can help train the students of medical universities after they graduate .

Just imagine how the application of AI can help resolve issues of HR department in the hospitals , companies and organizations of the country .

Ahmed said...

Dear Sir

Let’s suppose if professional and senior level doctors and surgeons from Pakistan migrate and settle in America and other western countries than it will become hard for students of Pakistan who graduate from medical universities to work under supervision of these senior and professional doctors . So don’t you think that by using robotic machines based on AI technology in hospitals , the students who graduate from medical colleges and universities of Pakistan can work with these AI based robotic machines and learn from them ?



Riaz Haq said...

Ahmed: "Let’s suppose if professional and senior level doctors and surgeons from Pakistan migrate and settle in America and other western countries than it will become hard for students of Pakistan who graduate from medical universities to work under supervision of these senior and professional doctors"

It's too early to talk of AI teaching tools where human lives are involved.

Pakistani doctors have been going abroad for decades but it has not affected the teaching quality as demonstrated by the success of Pakistani medical school graduates in the West.

There are many examples of Pakistani doctors who have returned to Pakistan to teach after advanced training and professional practice in the US and the UK.

In fact, a lot of the teaching staff at top teaching hospitals in Pakistan has had the benefit of advanced training in the West.

Ahmed said...

Dear Sir

The hospitals of Pakistan can only make their way into the index of top 500 hospitals of the world when government of Pakistan will do something about it . We can expect the foreign trained and qualified doctors of Pakistan to do everything .

The question is that what is the present government of Pakistan doing for the medical sector of the country ? Instead of looting and doing corruption what have these politicians done for Pakistan ?

Indian government has bad record but atleast Indian government is sincere with the economy , education and health sector of its country .



Riaz Haq said...

Ahmed: "Indian government has bad record but atleast Indian government is sincere with the economy , education and health sector of its country"

The public health and education sectors are a mess. Public hospitals and schools are poorly funded and badly run.

Read this: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/developing-contemporary-india/whats-missing-from-indias-education-system/

and this: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/india-covid-crisis-shows-public-health-neglect-problems-underinvestment.html

A few good hospitals that thrive on medical tourism are all private profit-making entities.

There's nothing in India comparable to non-profit hospitals like SKMH and AKU in Pakistan, nor is there an Edhi Foundation.

Incompetence of Indian public sector was on full display in gory details during the COVID pandemic. There were people gasping for breath and dying on the streets due to lack of oxygen cylinders.

India's economy is for the rich. Princeton Prof. Ashoka Mody Believes India is Broken | Princeton International

https://international.princeton.edu/news/why-prof-ashoka-mody-believes-india-broken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8SEmML71KQ

"I have long felt that that upbeat story is completely divorced from the lived reality of the vast majority of Indians. I wanted to write a book about that lived reality, about jobs, education, healthcare, the cities Indians live in, the justice system they encounter, the air they breathe, the water they drink. And when you look at India through that lens of that reality, the progress is halting at best and far removed from the aspirations of people and what might have been. India is broken in the sense that for hundreds of millions of Indians, jobs are hard to get, and education and health care are poor. The justice system is coercive and brutal. The air quality remains extraordinarily poor. The rivers are dying. And it's not clear that things are going to get better. Underlying that brokenness, social norms and public accountability have eroded to a point where India seems to be in a catch-22: Unaccountable politicians do not impose accountability on themselves; therefore, no one has an incentive to impose accountability for policy priorities that might benefit large numbers of people. The elite are happy in their gated first-world communities. They shrug their shoulders and say, “What exactly is the problem?”

Ahmed said...

Dear Sir

Thank you for your reply , sir you said while replying to my comment that the public education sector of India is at mess .

My comment :

I think to certain extent this is true Sir their are and might be many colleges and schools in India where quality of education might or maybe low and where students might not have been given proper skills and knowledge but Sir to be honest I saw a news from American news channel on YouTube many years ago where the host of the news program was talking about the education system of India and they were saying that most of the Indian students and engineers who migrating to America and Western countries are actually graduating from schools and colleges of India and their base in mathematics and science is pretty strong . So Sir what can you say about this ?

Thanks

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmad: "Indian students and engineers who migrating to America and Western countries are actually graduating from schools and colleges of India and their base in mathematics and science is pretty strong . So Sir what can you say about this?"


Indians who migrate to US are the creme de la creme of India. They are in no way representative of the broader population.

Please read this:

Worthless Degrees Are Creating an Unemployable Generation in India

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-17/india-s-worthless-college-degrees-undercut-world-s-fastest-growing-major-economy#xj4y7vzkg

“We have noticed a disturbing trend of some medical colleges in projecting bogus faculty and patients to obtain permission for admission of students,” the court said in its judgement. The medical college did not respond to a request for comment.

The Medical School is part of the RKDF Group, a well-known name in Central India with a wide network of colleges in fields ranging from Engineering to Medicine and Management. The group faced another controversy last year. In May last year, police in the southern city of Hyderabad arrested the vice-chancellor of the RKDF group’s Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan University as well as his predecessor for their alleged involvement in awarding fake degrees. Still, a flood of students could be seen in many RKDF institutes in Bhopal. One branch had posters of their “bright stars”—students who got jobs after graduation.

SRK University and RKDF University of RKDF Group did not respond to multiple requests for comment. On its website, the group says that it provides quality education by imparting teaching and practical skills while striving to provide robust infrastructure and facilities.

Elsewhere in Bhopal, another college was functioning in a small residential building. One of the students who studied there said that it was easy to secure admission and get a degree without attending classes.

India’s education industry is projected to reach $225 billion by 2025 from $117 billion in 2020, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation, a government trust. This is still very small compared to the US education industry, where spending is estimated to exceed $1 trillion. In India, public spending on education has remained stagnant at around 2.9% of GDP, well short of the 6% target set in the government’s new education policy.

The problems at the colleges have spread across the country, with a range of institutions in different states under official scrutiny. In some parts of India, students have gone on hunger strike to protest against the lack of teachers and facilities in their institutions. In January, charges were filed against the Himachal Pradesh-based Manav Bharti University and its promoters for allegedly selling fake degrees, according to a press release from the Enforcement Directorate. Manav Bharati University did not respond to a request for comment.

While institutes promote campus placements for students, many are not able to deliver on this promise. In 2017, an institute in the eastern state of Odisha offered fake job offers during campus placements, prompting students to protest.

Anil Swaroop, former secretary of school education, estimated in a 2018 article that of the 16,000 colleges offering bachelor’s qualifications for teachers, a sizeable number exist only in name.

Ahmed Yousafzai said...

Sir,

If the Indian education system is so bad how come they launch so many space satellites when we are launching nothing sir ?
They are running high-speed electric trains and have built trains even in IIOJK but we have no trains in AJK or Gilgit-Baltistan.
India had 167.5 million air passengers in 2019, Pakistan had 7.4 million air passengers. (22 times less than India).
They are exporting $770 billion annually products. Our exports are $39 billion (20 times less than India).
They have 160 GIGAWATTS of installed renewable energy. In Pakistan it is is only 0.4 MEGAWATTS (400 times less than India).
India has 151,000 km of national highway, we have 12,000 km (12 times less than India).
Pakistan’s maternal mortality rate is 186/100,000 and India’s is 97/100,000 (we are double that of India).
Pakistan’s GDP per capita is $1,400 and India’s is $2,600 (we are half of India).
There were 66,400 patent applications in India in 2022. In Pakistan, 400 patents were filed (166 times less than India).
Pakistanis made 140 million digital transactions in the first quarter of 2022. Indians made 9360 million (67 times less than India).
India has 108 unicorn startups. Pakistan has ZERO.
21% of Pakistanis are in SEVERE multidimensional poverty but only 4% of Indians are (we are 5 times more than India).

If India’s education system is so bad sir, does that mean ours is worse ?

From all the available “data” what other conclusion can we make sir ?

Alhamdulillah,

Ahmed




Riaz Haq said...

Ahmed: "From all the available “data” what other conclusion can we make sir?"


The Goldman Sachs BRICs formulation at the end of the end of the Cold War and new geopolitical realities gave India opportunities that Pakistanis could only dream of.

But what has happened? Why does India lag so far behind China? Why is China's per capita GDP 6 times higher? Why does China have its own space station and India doesn't?

https://www.riazhaq.com/2023/03/why-does-india-lag-so-far-behind-china.html

China was poorer than India until 1990 in terms of per capita income. In 2001, both nations were included in Goldman Sachs' BRICs group of 4 nations seen as most favored destinations for foreign direct investment. Since the end of the Cold War in 1990, the western nations, including the United States and western Europe, have supported India as a counterweight to China. But a comparison of the relative size of their economies reveals that China had a nominal GDP of US$17.7 trillion in 2021, while India’s was US$3.2 trillion. India invests only 30% of its GDP, compared with 50% for China; and 14% of India's economy comes from manufacturing, as opposed to 27% of China, according to the World Bank.

A recent SCMP opinion piece by Sameed Basha titled "Is India ready to take China’s place in the global economy? That’s just wishful thinking" has summed it up well:

"Comparing China to India is like comparing apples with oranges, with the only similarity being their billion-plus populations.......China is transforming itself into a technologically driven economy in order to exceed the potential of the US. In contrast, India is attempting to position itself as a market-driven economy utilizing its large population as a manufacturing base to compete with China........In its 2022 Investment Climate Statement on India, the US State Department called the country “a challenging place to do business” and highlighted its protectionist measures, increased tariffs and an inability to adjust from “Indian standards” to international standards".

Over 1.5 million patent applications were filed in China in 2021, the highest number in the world. By comparison, the patent filings in India were 61,573, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. China spends 2.4% of its GDP on research and development compared to India's 0.66%, according to the World Bank.

Riaz Haq said...

Kapil Sibal
@KapilSibal
·
12h
India ahead of China
Population :
India 1428 mn
China 1425 mn

Other indicators(2021)
World Bank Data :

GDP
China : $17.73 trillion
India : 3.18 trillion

Unemployment:
China : 4.8%
India: 7.7%

Annual inflation
(consumer prices) :
China : 1%
India : 5.1%

Think about it !

https://twitter.com/KapilSibal/status/1648877269124009984?s=20

Riaz Haq said...

#India Topping #China in #Population. Can it top China's #GDP? #Modi never misses a chance to cheer India as "world’s largest #democracy", "5th largest #economy" but it relegates #Muslims to 2nd class status. Can India create 90 million new jobs by 2030

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/world/asia/india-china-population.html?smid=tw-share


“The young people have a great potential to contribute to the economy,” said Poonam Muttreja, the executive director of the Population Foundation of India. “But for them to do that requires the country to make investments in not just education but health, nutrition and skilling for employability.”

There also need to be jobs. That’s a longstanding deficiency for a top-heavy and at times gridlocked economy that must somehow produce 90 million new jobs before 2030, outside agriculture, to keep employment rates steady. Even in the years immediately before the pandemic, India was falling far short of that pace.

In China, a shrinking and aging population will make it harder to sustain economic growth and achieve its geopolitical ambitions to surpass the United States. But in previous decades, when it was still growing, it found its way to transformative growth through export-driven manufacturing, like smaller East Asian countries did before it.

India has yet to be able to replicate that formula or to come up with one of its own that can achieve more than incremental gains.
----------

The rate of development across the huge country remains widely unequal, with some Indian states akin to middle-income nations and others struggling to provide the basics. The distribution of resources is increasingly becoming a tense political issue, testing India’s federal system.

When Gayathri Rajmurali, a local politician from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, found herself in India’s north for the first time this year, the disparity shocked her. “The north, they are behind 10 to 15 years to our places,” she said, pointing to indicators like basic infrastructure and average income.

And then there is the combustible environment created by the Hindu-first nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party, as his support base has sped up a century-old campaign to reshape India’s pluralist democratic tradition and relegate Muslims and other minorities to second-class citizenship. Demographic numbers are part of the political provocation game, with right-wing leaders often falsely portraying India’s Muslim population of 200 million as rising sharply in proportion to the Hindu population as they call on Hindu families to have more children.

Mr. Modi and his lieutenants say India is heading in only one direction: Up. They point to the undeniable gains in a country that has quadrupled the size of its economy within a generation.

Riaz Haq said...

#India Topping #China in #Population. Can it top China's #GDP? #Modi never misses a chance to cheer India as "world’s largest #democracy", "5th largest #economy" but it relegates #Muslims to 2nd class status. Can India create 90 million new jobs by 2030

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/world/asia/india-china-population.html?smid=tw-share

The two nations share several historical parallels. The last time they traded places in population, in the 18th century or earlier, the Mughals ruled India and the Qing dynasty was expanding the borders of China; between them they were perhaps the richest empires that had ever existed. But as European powers went on to colonize most of the planet and then industrialized at home, the people of India and China became among the world’s poorest.

As recently as 1990, the two countries were still on essentially the same footing, with a roughly equal economic output per capita. Since then, China has shaken the world by creating more wealth than any other country in history. While India, too, has picked itself back up in the three decades since it liberalized its economy, it remains well behind in many of the most basic scales.

Today, China’s economy is roughly five times the size of India’s. The average citizen of China has an economic output of almost $13,000 a year, while the average Indian’s is less than $2,500. In human-development indicators, the contrast is even sharper, with infant mortality rates much higher in India, life expectancy lower and access to sanitation less prevalent.

The divergence, analysts say, comes down largely to China’s central consolidation of policy power, serious land reform, an earlier start in opening up its economy to market forces starting in the late 1970s, and its single-minded focus on export-led growth. China took the first-mover advantage and then compounded its dominance as it pursued its plans relentlessly.

India started opening its quasi-socialist economy nearly a decade later. Its approach remained piecemeal, constrained by tricky coalition politics and the competing interests of industrialists, unions, farmers and factions across its social spectrum.

“There is that element where China is a natural role model — not for its politics, but for the sheer efficiency,” said Jabin Jacob, a professor of international relations and governance studies at Shiv Nadar University near New Delhi.

Riaz Haq said...

BRICs investing is a form of Winner Takes All......Investors favor a few at the expense of many.


https://fs.blog/mental-model-winner-take-all/

Winner Takes it All: How Markets Favor the Few at the Expense of the Many
Markets tend to favor unequal distributions of market share and profits, with a few leaders emerging in any industry. Winner-take-all markets are hard to disrupt and suppress the entry of new players by locking in market share for leading players.



***

In almost any market, crowds of competitors fight for business within their niche. But over time, with few exceptions, a small number of companies come to dominate the industry.

These are the names we all know. The logos we see every day. The brands which shape the world with every decision they make. Even those which are not household names have a great influence on our lives. Operating behind the scenes, they quietly grow more powerful each year, often sowing the seeds of their own destruction in the process.

A winner-take-all market doesn’t mean there is only one company in the market. Rather, when we say a winner takes all, what we mean is that a single company receives the majority of available profits. A few others have at best a modest share. The rest fight over a miniscule remnant, and tend not to survive long.

In a winner-take-all market, the winners have tremendous power to dictate outcomes. Winner-take-all markets occur in many different areas. We can apply the concept to all situations which involve unequal distributions.

Ahmed Yousufzai said...

Sir,

Your comparison of India with China is interesting but irrelevant as we didn’t separate from China. Pakistanis and Indians were brothers 75 years ago when our Qaid-e-Azam Jinnah sir decided we needed a new homeland for muslims to thrive. Even up until the 1980s things were not so bad. But ever since it looks like we’re slipping further and further behind India.

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmed: "Pakistanis and Indians were brothers 75 years ago when our Qaid-e-Azam Jinnah sir decided we needed a new homeland for muslims to thrive"

Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh are thriving when compared to Indian Muslims.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2022/08/pakistan-at-75-highlights-of-economic.html

Indian Muslims are now worse off than Dalits and slipping further, according to Indian government's own data. They are being lynched daily on the streets by ruling BJP thugs with the active connivance of police. Their homes are being demolished by Hindu Nationalist governments.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2018/11/study-indian-muslims-worse-off-than.html

In the Indian diaspora, there are very few Muslims. They are poorly educated. And so poor that they can't even afford to travel overseas.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2016/06/why-dont-indian-muslims-migrate-to.html

In the Silicon Valley where I live, there are a very few Indian Muslims while there are tens of thousands of Pakistani Muslims here, even though the population of Indian Muslims is about the same as Pakistan's. It's the same story with doctors too.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2016/05/pakistanis-make-up-silicon-valleys.html

Riaz Haq said...

#Indian court acquits 69 people of murder of 11 #Muslims during 2002 #Gujarat riots, overseen by current PM #Modi who was Chief Minister of Gujarat State. Former minister from ruling #BJP party among Hindus acquitted of killings in city of #Ahmedabad https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/20/indian-court-acquits-69-people-of-of-11-muslims-during-2002-gujarat-riots?CMP=share_btn_tw

The case related to the deaths of 11 Muslims who were killed after their homes in the city of Ahmedabad were set alight by Hindu mobs who rampaged through the streets during communal riots that took place in February 2002. According to an investigation into the attack afterwards, “there was no police help received by the Muslims and they were simply at the mercy of the miscreants”.

Thursday’s verdict by the special court dealt another blow for those still fighting for justice for the Gujarat riots. Over the past two decades, the state has been accused of protecting alleged Hindu perpetrators – including those who now hold some of the most powerful political offices in the country – as well as obstructing justice, intimidating Muslim victims and recently releasing some of the few who had been convicted of rape and violence against Muslims in the riots.

Shamshad Pathan, who represented the victims, said they would challenge the court’s decision in a higher court. “Justice has eluded the victims once again,” he said.

The Gujarat riots began after Muslims were suspected of setting alight a train carriage carrying Hindu pilgrims, sparking revenge attacks by Hindu groups in what became one of the worst outbreaks of religious bloodshed in India’s post-independence history. Officially about 1,000 people died in the violence, mostly Muslims, but civil society groups say the number was much higher.

India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, who leads the Hindu nationalist BJP government, was chief minister of Gujarat at the time and was accused of complicity in the bloodshed by allowing the Hindu groups to carry out the revenge attacks and encouraging police and authorities not to intervene to stop the violence. Modi denies any role and a supreme court panel found there was not enough evidence to prosecute him.

In this particular case, 86 Hindus were accused but 17 had died during the trial. Among those acquitted was Maya Kodnani, a former minister for Modi, who was a lawmaker at the time of the riots. She was also an accused in a case relating to the murder of 97 people during the riots and was convicted but later cleared by a higher court.

Those involved in rightwing Hindu vigilante groups Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which both have close links to them BJP, were also among the accused cleared of charges. As the verdict was announced, cries of “Jai Sri Ram”, a Hindu religious greeting that has been increasingly co-opted and weaponised by Hindu nationalists as a battle cry, were shouted outside the court.

“We have been saying from the first day that they were framed,” said the defence lawyer Chetan Shah. “Some of the accused were not present at the scene on the day of the incident.”

The acquittal of the 69 comes after the Gujarat government, which is still ruled by the BJP, recently decided to give early release to 11 Hindu convicts who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the gang-rape of a Muslim woman and the murder of members of her family, one of the few convictions successfully made in the Gujarat riots.


Ahmed Yousufzai said...

Sir,

Again, it seems you prefer to answer your own questions than those of those reading your blogs.

My question was not why Indian muslims are better off than Pakistan's muslims.

My question was, why are INDIANS better off ?

Why are there no INDIAN grooming gangs in the UK ?

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmed: "My question was, why are INDIANS better off? Why are there no INDIAN grooming gangs in the UK?


The premise of your questions is wrong.

Let me first address the "grooming gang" racist trope. It is debunked by the British government's own data on the subject: "Home Office report has concluded that there is no credible evidence that any one ethnic group is over-represented in cases of child sexual exploitation"

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/19/home-office-report-grooming-gangs-not-muslim


An average Pakistani is much better off than an average Indian.

Indians average per capita is deceptive because India is a very unequal society.

The bulk of the gains go to a very few people at the top while the rest of the population suffers deep deprivation.

Indian writer/poet Javed Akhtar recently noted that he saw no visible poverty in Pakistan. His anecdotal observation is backed by data from UNDDP.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2023/02/abp-india-summit-2023-javed-akhtar-saw.html

The UNDP poverty report shows that the income poverty (people living on $1.90 or less per day) in Pakistan is 3.6% while it is 22.5% in India and 14.3% in Bangladesh.

Over 75% of the world's poor deprived of basic living standards (nutrition, cooking fuel, sanitation and housing) live in India compared to 4.6% in Bangladesh and 4.1% in Pakistan, according to a recently released OPHI/UNDP report on multidimensional poverty. Here's what the report says: "More than 45.5 million poor people are deprived in only these four indicators (nutrition, cooking fuel, sanitation and housing). Of those people, 34.4 million live in India, 2.1 million in Bangladesh and 1.9 million in Pakistan—making this a predominantly South Asian profile".

Riaz Haq said...

#Rajasthan, #India: #Cow, hit by Vande Bharat #train, falls on man peeing on tracks, killing him. Parts of the cow fell on Shivdayal Sharma relieving himself on the track 30 meters away, killing him. #toilet https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/cow-hit-by-vande-bharat-train-in-alwar-falls-on-man-peeing-on-tracks-killing-him-2362617-2023-04-20

By India Today News Desk: A man relieving himself on the railway tracks in Alwar died after a cow, which came in the way of a Vande Bharat train, fell on him on Wednesday.

The incident occurred in the jurisdiction of Aravali Vihar police station in Alwar, Rajasthan. The deceased has been identified as Shivdayal Sharma -- a man who retired from the post of an electrician in the Indian Railways 23 years ago.

According to Shivdayal's relatives, a cow came in the way of a Vande Bharat train which left from Kali Mori gate around 8:30 am. The impact of the collision was such that a portion of the cow's body fell 30 metres away over Shivdayal, who was relieving himself on the tracks. Shivdayal died on the spot.

Shivdayal's body was sent for post-mortem to the district hospital on Wednesday morning. The semi-high speed Vande Bharat trains have had run-ins with cattle along many routes, the maximum number of them being reported from the Mumbai-Gujarat stretch.

Within days of its launch, the Mumbai-Gandhinagar Vande Bharat Superfast Express train suffered minor damage after colliding with cattle on October 6. The next day, the same train sustained a minor damage to its nose panel after it hit a cow near Anand station in Gujarat.

On October 8, the train had suffered a bearing defect in the traction motor of the C8 coach between the Dankaur and Wair stations. On October 29, the Mumbai-Gandhinagar Vande Bharat had a runover with a cattle near Atul in Gujarat's Valsad.

Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnav said collision with cattle on the tracks is unavoidable and this has been kept in mind while designing the semi-high-speed Vande Bharat trains, which run at a speed of approximately 130-160 kmph.

Meanwhile, the Western Railways has decided to put metal fencing along the over 620km-long Mumbai-Ahmedabad trunk route to stop animals from straying onto the tracks and prevent accidents.

Ahmed Yousufzai said...

Sir,

I’ve attached the UNDP report to this message.

Please review it.

It clearly states 16.4% of India’s population is multidimentsionally poor and the number for Pakistan is 38.3%.

So clearly, Pakistan is ATLEAST twice as poor as India is.

https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/hdp-document/2022mpireportenpdf.pdf

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmed: "It clearly states 16.4% of India’s population is multidimentsionally poor and the number for Pakistan is 38.3%"


The UNDP report is based on Modi's bogus data.

See examples below from The Economist Magazine:

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/01/05/postponing-indias-census-is-terrible-for-the-country

Narendra Modi often overstates his achievements. For example, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister’s claim that all Indian villages have been electrified on his watch glosses over the definition: only public buildings and 10% of households need a connection for the village to count as such.

And three years after Mr Modi declared India “open-defecation free”, millions of villagers are still purging al fresco. An absence of up-to-date census information makes it harder to check such inflated claims. It is also a disaster for the vast array of policymaking reliant on solid population and development data.

------------

For a while policymakers can tide themselves over with estimates, but eventually these need to be corrected with accurate numbers. “Right now we’re relying on data from the 2011 census, but we know our results will be off by a lot because things have changed so much since then,” says Pronab Sen, a former chairman of the National Statistical Commission who works on the household-consumption survey. And bad data lead to bad policy. A study in 2020 estimated that some 100m people may have missed out on food aid to which they were entitled because the distribution system uses decade-old numbers.
----------

Three years ago India’s government was scheduled to pose its citizens a long list of basic but important questions. How many people live in your house? What is it made of? Do you have a toilet? A car? An internet connection? The answers would refresh data from the country’s previous census in 2011, which, given India’s rapid development, were wildly out of date. Because of India’s covid-19 lockdown, however, the questions were never asked.

Almost three years later, and though India has officially left the pandemic behind, there has been no attempt to reschedule the decennial census. It may not happen until after parliamentary elections in 2024, or at all. Opposition politicians and development experts smell a rat.

----------



Similarly, it is important to know how many children live in an area before building schools and hiring teachers. The educational misfiring caused by the absence of such knowledge is particularly acute in fast-growing cities such as Delhi or Bangalore, says Narayanan Unni, who is advising the government on the census. “We basically don’t know how many people live in these places now, so proper planning for public services is really hard.”

The home ministry, which is in charge of the census, continues to blame its postponement on the pandemic, most recently in response to a parliamentary question on December 13th. It said the delay would continue “until further orders”, giving no time-frame for a resumption of data-gathering. Many statisticians and social scientists are mystified by this explanation: it is over a year since India resumed holding elections and other big political events.

Riaz Haq said...

Excerpt of "India is Broken" by Princeton Economist Ashoka Mody

Just as Modi’s demonetization and GST rollout heightened India’s job challenge, the policies likely also increased Indian poverty. On poverty, the data fog is even greater than that for GDP and employment. The only reliable estimate of those below the poverty line is from a 2011–2012 survey. An embarrassing official report for 2017–2018 appeared in late 2019, which the Modi government promptly threw out. The data, however, leaked. Using that data, S. Subramanian, a member of the World Bank’s Commission on Global Poverty, estimated the extent of Indian poverty, as defined by the Indian Planning Commission’s subsistence norm of 32 rupees (at 2011–2012 prices) per person per day in rural areas. The share of rural residents living in poverty had risen from 31 percent in 2011–2012 to 35 percent in 2017–2018. In starker terms, 320 million rural Indians lived in severe poverty in 2017–2018, which was fifty million more than just six years earlier. And in 2017–2018, 160 million rural Indians lived barely above the poverty line—sixty million more than six years earlier—spending between 32 and 38 rupees a day on their consumption needs. The Modi government insisted that the survey’s estimates of consumption were not credible because they were much lower than the per capita consumption implied by National Account Statistics. This was an old and unfounded argument. National account data in all countries show higher consumption than survey data, presumably because people underreport their consumption in surveys. But the underreporting is concentrated in richer households and does not influence the poverty estimates. Additionally, India’s national account statistics were suspect. Indian authorities did not directly measure the size of the informal sector; instead, they assumed it moved in tandem with the formal sector. After the Modi-inflicted blows to the informal sector, this procedure likely significantly overstated the income and consumption of those in the informal sector.

Mody, Ashoka. India Is Broken (pp. 352-353). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Ahmed Yousufzai said...

the article from the economist you’re linking to support your claim doesn’t claim Modi’s data is “BOGUS”. It just claims that Modi is postponing the 2021 census.

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmed: "the article from the economist you’re linking to support your claim doesn’t claim Modi’s data is “BOGUS”. It just claims that Modi is postponing the 2021 census"


Read the Economist article again.

It deals with the definitions used by the Modi government......such as the definitions of village electrification and open defecation.


Modi government claims the entire village is electrified with "only public buildings and 10% of households" electrified.


Modi gov't also calls villages "open defecation free" even when millions of people are still defecating in the open.

All of this false "multi-dimensional" data manufactured by Modi gov't is used by the UNDP report. That's reflected in a dramatic reduction in India's "multidimensional poverty" on Modi's watch.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/01/05/postponing-indias-census-is-terrible-for-the-country

"Narendra Modi often overstates his achievements. For example, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister’s claim that all Indian villages have been electrified on his watch glosses over the definition: only public buildings and 10% of households need a connection for the village to count as such"

"And three years after Mr Modi declared India “open-defecation free”, millions of villagers are still purging al fresco. An absence of up-to-date census information makes it harder to check such inflated claims. It is also a disaster for the vast array of policymaking reliant on solid population and development data"

Riaz Haq said...

India is open defecation free. Not near where the prime minister lives

https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/11/22/india-is-open-defecation-free-not-near-where-the-prime-minister-lives

Every day, Suman, 32, wakes up early, fills up a lota or a plastic water bottle and walks out to the forest adjoining the Kirby Place slum in central Delhi to relieve herself. As do hundreds of men, women and children from the slum. Kirby Place is supposed to be “open defecation free”, like, according to a declaration by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Gandhi Jayanti in 2019, all the rest of India.

Kirby Place is barely 10 km from the prime minister’s residence in New Delhi.

The slum is under the jurisdiction of the Delhi Cantonment Board, a municipal body administratively controlled by the defence ministry’s Directorate General Defence Estates. Delhi Cantt is not merely open defecation free, the website of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan declares, all its community and public toilets are “functional and well maintained” and its sewage is “safely managed and treated”.

It’s a far bleaker reality on the ground, however.

Although the Delhi Cantonment Board has stationed mobile toilets in Kirby Place, most aren’t functional or usable, compelling hundreds of nearly 3,000 residents to use the outdoors.

“Only a few of the toilets are operational. So the people have no option but to go to the jungle,” said Bhanu Prasad, 40, a resident who works as a security guard in South Delhi.

The mobile toilets are also difficult to access. Most lack stairs and even doors. “How can women climb up there?” Bhanu Prasad asked, pointing to a mobile toilet, a minitruck with 10 toilet seats. The doorway is nearly four feet from the ground.

“The stairs get stolen and we all have to suffer,” Bhanu Prasad said. “We don’t know who steals them.”

Another problem is the lack of cleanliness. “The condition of the toilets isn’t really good. They are often too dirty and there are no stairs to go up,” said Suman, a housewife whose shanty is barely 50 metres from a mobile toilet station. “So, we all go to the jungle.”

Which is no less a challenge, said Suman’s neighbour Roshan, 35. “Everyone goes to defecate in the jungle. So it has become very dirty and stinky. But what else can we do?” said Roshan, who doesn’t use a second name like most people in the slum, the majority of whom she said belong to “the downtrodden castes”.

Parvati, another neighbour, said that sometimes men sit near where women go, “making it weird and uncomfortable”. “So we try to go as early as possible,” she added.

The Kirby Place slum as well as the neighbouring Brar Square are built on defence ministry land, so most residents aren’t allowed to raise any concrete structures, including toilets. “We do not even have electricity here,” said Umma, another neighbour of Suman’s.

A Delhi Cantonment Board official who helps oversee its sanitation work confirmed that “no concrete structures can be built in the area”. “So, we provide them mobile toilets,” added the official, who asked to speak anonymously because he wasn’t authorised to talk to the press.

There are 16 mobile toilet vans in Kirby Place, six in Brar Square, and one each in Naraina and Poultry Farm nearby, the official said. Five of them aren’t functional and a couple are used by the army. Newslaundry, however, found 20 toilet vans in Kirby Place and four in Brar Square. In Kirby Place, the vans are stationed at two spots. At one spot, only one of the six vans are usable. “Five vans are unusable. Some do not have doors and storage tanks leak,” said Rajendra, a Kirby Place resident. At the other spot, Newslaundry found nine of the 14 vans to be functional.

“Five of the vans at this spot have not been in use for months. So, I have to clean only one,” said Pinto, a sanitation worker who cleans the toilets.

Ahmed Yousufzai said...

Income inequality in Pakistan is FAR WORSE than in India or Bangladesh. Please read this recent article from a newspaper in Pakistan.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2408328/income-inequality-and-poverty-in-pakistan?amp=1

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmed: "Income inequality in Pakistan is FAR WORSE than in India or Bangladesh. Please read this recent article from a newspaper in Pakistan"

No, Pakistan's Gini coefficient (29.5) being lower than India's (35.7) and Bangladesh's (32.5) means Pakistan's inequality is the lowest among the three.

"A higher number indicates greater inequality, with 1 being maximum inequality and 0 being perfect equality. A low Gini Coefficient implies that there is less economic disparity among people within a given society, meaning a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources"

https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country/

I'm surprised that Shahid Javed Burki, the author of the Express Tribune piece you quoted, doesn't understand it.

Please read this: https://www.riazhaq.com/2021/04/income-inequality-elite-capture-in.html

A recent United Nations report on inequality reveals that the richest 1% in Pakistan take 9% of the national income. A quick comparison with other South Asian nations shows that 9% income share for the top 1% in Pakistan is lower than 15.8% in Bangladesh and 21.4% in India. These inequalities result mainly from a phenomenon known as "elite capture" that allows a privileged few to take away a disproportionately large slice of public resources such as public funds and land for their benefit.

Ahmed said...

Dear Sir

Thanks for your replies to my questions about education system of India , Sir you quoted the link of this article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-17/india-s-worthless-college-degrees-undercut-world-s-fastest-growing-major-economy#xj4y7vzkg?leadSource=uverify%20wall

My comment :

Sir the above link of Bloomberg which you quoted mostly and to great extent focuses on the problems of education in a specific city called “BHOPAL” . India is a country which as far as I remember have 22 or 24 states and many many cities .
The question is that how many cities and states of India are facing this same level do educational problems like BHOPAL?





Ahmed said...

Dear Sir.

Pls check this article , according to this article India has one of the best educational systems in the world .

India ranks well regarding the best education systems in the world, with a quality index of 59.1 according to a CEOWORLD survey. Moreover, the country is considered to have the most challenging Mathematics curriculum worldwide and the toughest exam, the IIT-JEE.

Sir for further information pls check this link .
https://reedsws.com/top-advantages-of-the-indian-education-system/

Can you pls throw some light on this ?

Thanks

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmad: "Sir the above link of Bloomberg which you quoted mostly and to great extent focuses on the problems of education in a specific city called “BHOPAL”


The author is using Bhopal as an example but the problem is nationwide. Read below from the Bloomberg piece:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-17/india-s-worthless-college-degrees-undercut-world-s-fastest-growing-major-economy#xj4y7vzkg



The problems at the colleges have spread across the country, with a range of institutions in different states under official scrutiny. In some parts of India, students have gone on hunger strike to protest against the lack of teachers and facilities in their institutions. In January, charges were filed against the Himachal Pradesh-based Manav Bharti University and its promoters for allegedly selling fake degrees, according to a press release from the Enforcement Directorate. Manav Bharati University did not respond to a request for comment.

While institutes promote campus placements for students, many are not able to deliver on this promise. In 2017, an institute in the eastern state of Odisha offered fake job offers during campus placements, prompting students to protest.

Anil Swaroop, former secretary of school education, estimated in a 2018 article that of the 16,000 colleges offering bachelor’s qualifications for teachers, a sizeable number exist only in name.

“To call such so-called degrees useless would be an understatement,” said Anil Sadgopal, former dean of education at Delhi University and former member of the Central Advisory Board of Education that guides the federal government. “When lakhs of youth become unemployed every year, the whole society becomes unstable.”

All this is a challenge for big business. A study by HR firm SHL found that only 3.8% of engineers have the skills needed to be employed in software-related jobs in start-ups.

“The experience everyone has in the IT industry is that graduates need training,” said Mohandas Pai, former chief financial officer and board member of Infosys Ltd. and co-founder of private equity firm Aarin Capital. Pai, one of the Manipal Education and Medical Group companies, “trains a lot of people for banking. They are not job ready, they need to be trained.”

Even though companies are looking to recruit in areas such as electric vehicle manufacturing, artificial intelligence and human-machine interfaces, smaller Indian universities still teach older material such as the basics of the internal combustion engine, Patial said. “There’s a gap between what the industry is seeing and the curriculum they’ve gone through.”

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmad: "India ranks well regarding the best education systems in the world, with a quality index of 59.1 according to a CEOWORLD survey"


This "CEOWORLD survey" you refer to doesn't make a lot of sense. It puts countries/regions like Austria, China and Hong Kong below India.

https://ceoworld.biz/2020/05/10/ranked-worlds-best-countries-for-education-system-2020/

A more reliable measure is how poorly Indian students perform on standardized international tests like ASER and PISA.


why Pakistani students perform substantially better at the highest mathematics level than students in either India or the Bangladesh pilot.

https://books.google.com/books?id=89NVEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT66&lpg=PT66&dq=math+reading+scores+india+pakistan&source=bl&ots=EKMT5umqlF&sig=ACfU3U3Ij4pJxMd5LaNdNhuO03nACf5OGA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiS1PXLxbz-AhWOI0QIHdNcAQEQ6AF6BAgwEAM#v=onepage&q=math%20reading%20scores%20india%20pakistan&f=false

https://www.riazhaq.com/2014/08/pakistani-children-outperform-indian.html

The results of a test called "Supertest", developed by researchers from the US, China, Russia and India,, show that Indian engineering students perform very poorly relative to their peers in other countries. Supertest is the first study to track the progress of students in computer science and electrical engineering over the course of their studies with regard to their abilities in physics, mathematics and critical thinking and compare the results among four countries.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2021/03/indian-engineering-students-perform.html

Riaz Haq said...

India expects all primary & lower-secondary school kids to be educated by 2030: UNESCO report

https://theprint.in/india/india-expects-all-primary-lower-secondary-school-kids-to-be-educated-by-2030-unesco-report/811148/


The report indicates that these numbers are significantly higher than 2015. That year, 36.5 per cent and 38.8 per cent of students achieved minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics at the end of primary education. However, this number is expected to grow to 90 per cent and 85 per cent in 2025.

Lower secondary levels of mathematics proficiency, at 12.3 per cent in 2015, were lower than Bangladesh (31 per cent), Nepal (53.8 per cent), Pakistan (68 per cent) and Sri Lanka (50.6 per cent). But for India, the number is expected to grow over six times to 75 per cent by 2030.

Riaz Haq said...

Remittances Sent By Pakistani Expats Reach $2.5 Billion In March: Central Bank
Pakistan and the IMF have been negotiating the programme's resumption for months but have yet to reach an agreement

https://www.outlookindia.com/business/remittances-sent-by-pakistani-expats-reach-2-5-billion-in-march-central-bank-news-277403

Pakistani expatriates sent home $2.5 billion in remittances in March, a seven-month high, the State Bank of Pakistan said on Monday, as the cash-strapped country tried to avert a major economic crisis. The data from the central bank showed that the inflow of workers’ remittances was 27 per cent higher compared to February. However, it was 11 per cent lower compared to March 2022, Geo News reported.

Pakistan, currently tackling a major economic crisis, is grappling with high external debt, a weak local currency and dwindling foreign exchange reserves. According to the report, historical trends suggest that Pakistanis living abroad sent record-high remittances ahead of Eid festivals each year.

According to the report, inflows remained comparatively high as non-resident Pakistanis used legal channels to send funds to their family, given the shrinking gap between rates in the interbank and the open market. Pakistani expatriates in Saudi Arabia topped the list of remittances by sending an amount of $563.9 million in March. However, it was 24.04 per cent lower than the $454.6 million received in February, the report said.


Pakistanis living in the UAE sent home 25.52 per cent more as receipts increased from $406.7 million to $324 million. Remittances from overseas Pakistanis in the UK increased 33.12 per cent to $422 million, the report said, adding that they sent $317 million in February. Head of Research at Arif Habib Limited, Tahir Abbas, said that the monthly increase in the remittances is due to the Ramzan factor that usually fetches higher flows due to family commitments, welfare, and charity, among other things.

"The flows in the upcoming months are expected to remain elevated due to another Eid falling by the end of this fiscal year," Abbas was quoted as saying in the report. Terming the increase a “good omen”, Head of Research at Pakistan-Kuwait Investment Company, Samiullah Tariq, said, “Remittances number is highest for past seven months; however, this year Ramzan has started earlier which is why remittance inflow increased earlier than last year,” the report said.

According to a prominent US-based think tank, the United States Institute of Peace, Pakistan needs to repay a whopping $77.5 billion in external debt from April 2023 to June 2026. It added that the cash-strapped country might face disruptive effects if it ultimately defaults. Pakistan is awaiting a much-needed $1.1 billion tranche of funding from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, originally due to be disbursed in November last year.

The funds are part of a $6.5 billion bailout package the IMF approved in 2019, which analysts say is critical if Pakistan is to avoid defaulting on external debt obligations. The IMF programme, signed in 2019, will expire on June 30, 2023, and under the set guidelines, the programme cannot be extended beyond the deadline. Pakistan and the IMF have been negotiating the programme's resumption for months but have yet to reach an agreement.

Kamran Khan said...

Haq Sahab,

India's Median wealth per adult in 2022 Credit Suisse's report now is 3.4K USD.
Pakistan is almost 1K USD behind at 2.5K USD

Also, Credit Sussie notes that quality of Indian data is "Fair" while Pakistan's data is "Poor".

I do not think we Pakistani are getting richer or earning more than Indians do, even though their unemployment is more than ours.

Lastly, how come geopolitical compulsions help India for 30 years? Last time India faced a balance of payment crisis it was 1991 or 92. How come west have kept it prop'ed up for so many years after that? We have faced many more balance of payment crisis since then. 2008 comes to mind. In late 90s and early 00s west was not even considering China as a serious threat to help India. Infact, India was not considered as an ally while Pakistan a partner in War on Terror after 9/11.

How can you say that it is only India's geopolitical situation that has kept it out of balance of payment crisis since 1991?

Riaz Haq said...

Kamran: "India's Median wealth per adult in 2022 Credit Suisse's report now is 3.4K USD. Pakistan is almost 1K USD behind at 2.5K USD"


Credit Suisse wealth report explains it well:

"Much of the year-on-year change in our estimates of the household wealth of individual countries depends on asset prices and exchange rates. The most significant development in 2021 was the widespread and sizable gains in share prices. Among the countries covered in Figure 3 (G7 countries plus China, India and Russia), India led the way with a 31% rise, but France (28%), the United States (23%), Italy (23%) and Canada (22%) were not far behind. Elsewhere, share prices rose by more than 30% in Austria, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Israel, and by more than 40% in Romania, Czechia and the UAE. Share prices may have risen much faster in Iran, but the data are less reliable. In contrast, share prices fell by 2.2% in China, by 5%–6% in New Zealand, Chile and Pakistan, and by 17% in Hong Kong SAR"

https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html

Facts:

Share Prices in India jumped 30% in 2021

Share Prices in Pakistan dropped 6% in 2021

PKR devalued relative to US$ by 9.4% in 2021.


Kamran: "Lastly, how come geopolitical compulsions help India for 30 years?"


The Cold War ended in 1990. That's the year US began the process of cultivating India as a "strategic partner" and started seeing Pakistan in a less favorable light. There was the Pressler Amendment and a series of sanctions on Pakistan.

The sanctions were lifted when US needed Pakistan to fight in Afghanistan.

At the same time, the BRICS model of investing was promoted by Goldman Sachs, also sometimes called "Government Sachs" by many Americans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/business/dealbook/goldman-sachs-goverment-jobs.html

"BRICS" benefited India in directing lots of FDI to India. However, Indians' incompetence has still left them far behind China. But the US is still betting on them to counter China's growing power in Asia.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2023/03/why-does-india-lag-so-far-behind-china.html

China was poorer than India until 1990 in terms of per capita income. In 2001, both nations were included in Goldman Sachs' BRICs group of 4 nations seen as most favored destinations for foreign direct investment. Since the end of the Cold War in 1990, the western nations, including the United States and western Europe, have supported India as a counterweight to China. But a comparison of the relative size of their economies reveals that China had a nominal GDP of US$17.7 trillion in 2021, while India’s was US$3.2 trillion. India invests only 30% of its GDP, compared with 50% for China; and 14% of India's economy comes from manufacturing, as opposed to 27% of China, according to the World Bank.

Riaz Haq said...

UK Adds 226 New Visa Categories to Urgently Hire Skilled Workers


https://propakistani.pk/2023/05/18/uk-adds-226-new-visa-categories-to-urgently-hire-skilled-workers/


Exciting opportunities have emerged for Pakistani youth seeking employment abroad as the United Kingdom opens its doors to skilled workers from around the world, including Pakistan.

In response to the severe manpower shortage currently faced by Britain, the country has introduced a significant expansion in its immigration policies.


According to official reports, a total of 226 new immigration categories have been established, accompanied by a noteworthy increase in the minimum wage across all job categories.

This development marks the first time that professions such as police officers, journalists, judges, secret officers, barristers, lawyers, and flight pilots have been included in the immigration category. Furthermore, an additional 31 categories have been designated, encompassing diverse fields such as musicians, dancers, doctors, actors, and scientists.

The expanded opportunities extend beyond specific professions, as drivers, instructors, railway station assistants, air hostesses, cabin crew, veterinary doctors, and tailors are now eligible to pursue employment in the UK. Moreover, individuals with expertise in areas such as masonry, aircraft engineering, AC/fridge engineering, welding, charity work, and estate agency will also find potential avenues for relocation.

Students pursuing education in the UK can now benefit from the post-study work facility, which allows them to gain valuable work experience following the completion of their studies. Notably, highly-educated professionals can anticipate a substantial 20 percent increase in their remuneration, as highlighted in the official letter.

To facilitate the approved manpower shortage category, the UK government has taken steps to keep visa fees at a reasonable level, ensuring accessibility for individuals seeking employment opportunities in the country.

These progressive changes in the UK’s immigration policies provide an encouraging prospect for skilled workers from Pakistan and around the world. The reduced visa fees and the inclusion of a diverse range of professions reflect the British government’s commitment to addressing the pressing shortage of manpower while simultaneously welcoming talented individuals to contribute to the country’s workforce.

Aspiring professionals from Pakistan are encouraged to explore these newfound possibilities, which not only promise career growth but also cultural exchange and personal development. The opportunities available in the UK cater to a wide spectrum of skills and talents, fostering an environment where individuals can thrive and make significant contributions to their chosen fields.


With these favorable policy revisions, Pakistanis can now embark on a transformative journey, utilizing their expertise to build successful careers and establish meaningful connections in the United Kingdom.

Riaz Haq said...

The UK has become one of the world’s most accepting places for foreign workers, according to a survey in 24 nations revealing a sharp increase in British acceptance of economic migration.


https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/23/uk-now-among-most-accepting-countries-for-foreign-workers-survey-finds


Shortfall of 330,000 workers in UK due to Brexit, say thinktanks
Read more

People in the UK emerged as less likely to think that when jobs are scarce employers should give priority to people of their own country than those in Norway, Canada, France, Spain, the US, Australia and Japan. Only Germany and Sweden were more open on that question.

In what the study’s authors described as “an extraordinary shift”, only 29% of people in the UK in 2022 said priority over jobs should go to local people, compared with 65% when the same question was asked in 2009.

The findings come as employers call for more migration to help fill more than 1m vacancies, and after the prime minister appointed the anti-immigration firebrand Lee Anderson as deputy chair of the Conservative party. He has called people arriving in small boats on the south coast “criminals” and called for them to be “sent back the same day”. Police have been deployed to hotels where asylum seekers are being housed amid violent protests by anti-immigration activists.

“It was unthinkable a decade ago that the UK would top any international league table for positive views of immigration,” said Prof Bobby Duffy, the director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, who shared the findings from the latest round of the survey exclusively with the Guardian and the BBC. “But that’s where we are now, with the UK the least likely, from a wide range of countries, to say we should place strict limits on immigration or prohibit it entirely.”

The UK ranked fourth out of 24 nations for the belief that immigrants have a very or quite good impact on the development of the country – ahead of Norway, Spain, the US and Sweden.

One factor in the shift in opinions on the question of “British jobs for British workers” may be that in 2009 the UK was in a deep recession, with more than double today’s unemployment, whereas today the economy suffers from a worker shortage, with 1.1m vacancies in the UK, 300,000 more than before the pandemic.

Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, last year urged employers to look to the British workforce in the first instance and “get local people”, although the government has widened visa programmes for seasonal workers and care staff.

Duffy said the findings showed that “it’s time to listen more carefully to public attitudes”. He said: “Politicians often misread public opinion on immigration. In the 2000s, Labour government rhetoric and policy on this issue was more relaxed than public preferences, and arguably they paid the price – but the current government is falling into the reverse trap.”

People in the UK are now the least likely of the 24 countries that participate in the World Values Survey study to think immigration increases unemployment, and second from top in thinking that immigrants fill important job vacancies.

They are very likely to say immigration boosts cultural diversity, and very unlikely to think immigration comes with crime and safety risks. However, more people in the UK think immigration leads to “social conflict” than in several other countries, including Canada, Japan and China.

Riaz Haq said...

Indians and Pakistanis in Australia as per 2016 Census

Pakistanis

People 61,915

Male 37,720

Female 24,195

Australian citizen 42.3%

Not an Australian citizen 56.0%

https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2016/7106_0


Indians

People 455,388
Male 245,416
Female 209,972
Australian citizen 48.1%
Not an Australian citizen 50.8%

https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2016/7103_0

Riaz Haq said...

Brain drain: Two in three Indian emigrants are highly educated

https://scroll.in/article/1021175/brain-drain-two-in-three-indian-emigrants-are-highly-educated


Indians have been leaving the country in droves because of better job and education opportunities.


The world’s largest source of immigrants also ranks high in terms of their education levels. And here is why that is a problem.


Nearly two-thirds of those migrating out of India seem to be highly educated, having received academic or vocational training. This is the highest for any country, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

This brain drain is a “consequence of an education system designed for ‘selecting’ the best and brightest in an economy that is still too controlled and cannot create opportunities for its best and brightest”, according to economist Shruti Rajagopalan.

Unemployment crisis
In India, unemployment levels rise with education, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. As of December 2021, one in five college graduates was unemployed. Besides a lack of jobs, there are also the problems of a skills-opportunity mismatch and corruption to deal with in the country.

Additionally, gender and caste discrimination still wreak havoc. These problems exist in the west as well but are not as acute as they are in India.

Opportunities abroad
Indians have been leaving the country in droves because of job opportunities with better pay and work hours. In the United States and United Kingdom, for instance, professionals in the healthcare and science, technology, engineering and math fields are in high demand.

Further, international students are a great source of income for universities abroad. For Indian students, it is not only the quality of courses but the diversity and holistic set-up in those campuses, too, are a huge draw.

An added attraction is the opportunity to stay on after graduation. Post-study visas, like the H-1B in the US, have mostly gone to Indians. Western countries have also etched out categories for startup founders and innovators.

No wonder then that the number of Indians studying abroad is set to grow from 7.7 lakh in 2019 to 18 lakh in 2024.

Riaz Haq said...

Migration of academics: Economic development does not necessarily lead to brain drain

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-migration-academics-economic-necessarily-brain.html

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, developed a database on international migration of academics in order to assess emigration patterns and trends for this key group of innovators. Their paper was published in PNAS on Jan. 18.

As a first step, the team produced a database that contains the number of academics who publish papers regularly, and migration flows and migration rates for all countries that include academics who published papers listed on the bibliographic database Scopus. The migration database was obtained by leveraging metadata of more than 36 million journal articles and reviews published from 1996 to 2021.

"This migration database is a major resource to advance our understanding of the migration of academics," says MPIDR Researcher Ebru Sanliturk. Data Scientist Maciej Danko adds: "While the underlying data are proprietary, our approach generates anonymized aggregate-level datasets that can be shared for noncommercial purposes and that we are making publicly available for scientific research."

MPIDR Researcher Aliakbar Akbaritabar explains how they processed the bibliographic data in order to receive information about the migration patterns of academics: "We used the metadata of the article title, name of the authors and affiliations of almost every article and review published in Scopus since 1996. We followed every single one of the roughly 17 million researchers listed in the bibliographic database through the years and noticed changes in affiliation and, by using that tactic we know how many academics left a given country every year."

The researchers' empirical analysis focused on the relationship between emigration and economic development, indicating that academic setting patterns may differ widely from population-level ones.

Previous literature has shown that, as low-income countries become richer, overall emigration rates initially rise. At a certain point the increase slows down and the trend reverses, with emigration rates declining.

This means that favoring economic development has the counterintuitive effect of initially increasing migration from low- and middle-income countries, rather than decreasing it.

Is this pattern also generally valid for migration of scientists?

Not really.

The researchers found that, when considering academics, the pattern is the opposite: in low- and middle-income countries, emigration rates decrease as the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increases. Then, starting from around 25,000 US Dollars in GDP, the trend reverses and emigration propensity increases as countries get richer.

MPIDR Director Emilio Zagheni adds, "Academics are a crucial group of innovators whose work has relevant economic effects. We showed that their propensity to emigrate does not immediately increase with economic development—indeed it decreases until a high-income turning point and then increases. This implies that increasing economic development does not necessarily lead to an academic brain drain in low- and middle-income countries."

Unveiling these and related patterns, and addressing big scientific questions with societal implications, was possible only because of painstaking work in preparing this new global database of migration of academics. "We are putting the final touches on an even more comprehensive database, the Scholarly Migration Database, which will be released on its own website soon," says software developer Tom Theile.

Riaz Haq said...

Outbound mobility trends for five key sending markets (of international students) in Asia (in 2022)

Bangladesh (70,000) , Nepal (125,500), Pakistan (103,190), Philippines (62,000) and Thailand (40,720).

https://monitor.icef.com/2023/03/outbound-mobility-trends-for-five-key-sending-markets-in-asia/


Pakistan
The most recent UNESCO data (2020) counts 64,065 Pakistani students abroad in higher education. Outbound mobility from Pakistan was over 103,190 in 2022 when we consult more recent statistics published by government sources in various destinations. There have been large increases in Pakistani students recorded recently in the UK, Australia, US, Canada, and Germany.

The top three destinations for Pakistani students currently are UAE, UK, and Australia.

UAE: 24,865 in 2020 according to UNESCO
UK: 23,075 in 2021/22 (+62% y-o-y)
Australia: 15,875 in 2022 (+15%)
US: 8,770 in 2021/22 (+17%)
Germany: 7,115 in 2021/22 (+22%)
Canada: 6,405 in 2022 (+38%)
Kyrgyzstan: 6,000 in 2020 according to UNESCO
Malaysia: 4,700 in 2021
Turkey: 2,385 in 2020 according to UNESCO
Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sweden, Qatar: At least 4,000 in 2020 according to UNESCO

Riaz Haq said...

Diaspora's role in promoting health care in Pakistan

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2501083/diasporas-role-in-promoting-health-care-in-pakistan

Shahid Javed Burki

Physicians of Pakistani origin living and working in the United States constitute an important part of their country's diaspora. The size of the Pakistani diaspora is now estimated at 700,000 or 0.2 per cent of the American population. Those who have moved to the United States account for 0.3 per cent of the Pakistani population. As I will take up later in this article, I and one Pakistani doctor have played active roles in getting the diaspora involved in the affairs of their country. While I established an institution based in Lahore that is now named after me, Dr Nasim Ashraf developed a close relationship with General Pervez Musharraf who gave him a position as a member of his cabinet.

Nasim Ashraf has recently self-published a book that provides a detailed account of the way Pakistani physicians under his leadership began to work together under an effective organisation called AAPNA. The acronym stands for the Association of Physicians of Pakistani descent in North America. Ashraf's book is appropriately titled Ringside, since it provides a view of the political ring that he watched from the sidelines in Pakistan. The book focuses on the role the Pakistani physicians have played in helping the country of their origin to improve the situation of health which has caused economists such as myself to worry how the country's poor performance in the sector of health is likely to affect its economic, social and political progress.

Nasim Ashraf has recently self-published a book that provides a detailed account of the way Pakistani physicians under his leadership began to work together under an effective organisation called AAPNA. The acronym stands for the Association of Physicians of Pakistani descent in North America. Ashraf's book is appropriately titled Ringside, since it provides a view of the political ring that he watched from the sidelines in Pakistan. The book focuses on the role the Pakistani physicians have played in helping the country of their origin to improve the situation of health which has caused economists such as myself to worry how the country's poor performance in the sector of health is likely to affect its economic, social and political progress.

Pakistan's health system as redesigned by the 18th Amendment to the Constitution has passed on the responsibility of providing healthcare of the citizens to the provincial governments. They have not been effective in performing this role. There are a number of problems with the system. Of these, four are important: lack of finance; deep differences in coverage provided in the urban and rural areas; not enough focus on child- and mother-care; and a serious shortage of paramedics, nurses in particular. Taking the last first.

A paramedic is a healthcare professional whose main role has been to respond to emergency calls for medical help. Following the response, the affected person is transferred to a well-established medical facility such as hospitals and clinics. This system was put to test during the Covid crisis when Pakistan performed better than neighbouring India in part because the pandemic there struck difficult-to-reach slums in the highly population-dense city of Mumbai. Pakistan has only 106,000 nurses to serve a population now estimated at 240 million. As discussed below, the Burki Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) has launched a programme to increase the number of paramedics in the country, in particular in the areas around the megacity of Lahore.

Riaz Haq said...

Pakistan’s Top Talent Is Leaving the Country in Record Numbers

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-31/pakistan-s-brightest-leave-at-record-pace-with-high-cost-of-living-pkr-drop?embedded-checkout=true

Economic hardship has pushed skilled workers to move abroad, hollowing out banks, hospitals and multinational companies.

One million skilled workers — doctors, engineers, accountants and managers, among others — left Pakistan over the past three years alone, according to a government tally. That makes Pakistan one of the top 10 countries for emigration.

Asad Ejaz Butt is one of Pakistan’s best and brightest. After completing graduate studies in Canada, the economist returned home with a drive to contribute to his home country and its development.

Yet prestigious jobs working under two finance ministers weren’t enough to pay the bills. Over the past few years, as Pakistan’s inflation outranked any other nation in Asia, Butt couldn’t afford basic necessities, including rent. So he left his highly coveted government job and moved back to North America — to buy time and complete another advanced degree.

Riaz Haq said...

As per the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], “In terms of magnitude of the high-skilled diaspora in the OECD area, India takes the lead, with over 3 million tertiary-educated migrants, followed by China [2 million] and the Philippines [1.8 million].”

The findings were published in OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 239. The data refers to 2015/16.

https://www.y-axis.com/news/india-produces-highest-number-highly-educated-migrants/

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This chart shows where the world's highly educated migrants come from

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/12/where-do-highly-educated-migrants-come-from/#:~:text=For%20India%2C%20which%20topped%20the,the%20OECD%20%E2%80%93%20or%202.25%20million.

OECD data reveals that there are around 120 million migrants living in OECD member countries. 30 to 35 percent of these migrants are considered highly educated, meaning they have received vocational or academic training. Among the most common birth countries for highly educated migrants, these shares are a lot higher, however.

For India, which topped the list as of 2015/16 with more than three million highly educated migrants in the OECD, the share of those considered of high education status was nearly 65 percent. China had a rate of 48.6 percent highly educated migrants in the OECD – or 2.25 million.

The Philippines come in rank 3, behind the world’s two biggest countries and ahead of a list of OECD nations, naturally trading highly educated personnel back and forth with each other, especially within Europe. 53.3 percent of Filipino immigrants to the OECD are considered highly educated, which brings the total to almost 1.9 million for a country of just over 100 million inhabitants. In a paper on the Philippines, the International Labor Organization finds that many of those high skilled migrants - to OECD countries and elsewhere – were health care professionals, especially nurses. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Philippines government has put a stop to this brain drain at least temporarily by capping the deployment of newly hired nurses at 5,000 per year.

Around half of Filipino migrants in the OECD chose the United States, forming one of the most important migration corridors identified by the OECD, behind Mexican and Indian immigration to the United States and ahead of Polish immigration to Germany.