By Shah Nasir Khisro
There exists a quiet tragedy at the heart of modern Pakistan, one that rarely commands headlines but silently shapes every crisis we face, from urban flooding to food inflation to the restless tide of young men leaving their ancestral lands. This tragedy is simply this: we have forgotten where we came from. We have turned our backs on the village. In the hopeful, fledgling years after independence, Pakistan understood something that subsequent generations of policymakers seemed to lose. The nation’s backbone was not its imposing secretariats in Islamabad or the bustling bazaars of Karachi. It was the mud-brick home, the shared well, the communal threshing floor. During the 1950s and 1960s, a quiet revolution was attempted from below. Visionaries like Akhtar Hameed Khan, a social scientist of uncommon humility, planted the seeds of the Comilla Model.
Here was a man who believed that villagers, if trusted with cooperatives and basic education, could lift themselves. Alongside him came the Village Aid program and the Basic Democracies system, imperfect yet sincere experiments in handing shovels to the very people who tilled the soil. For a while, it worked. Grain silos filled. Rural markets hummed. A farmer in Punjab could send his child to a local school not as a charity case but as a matter of course. Pakistan, in those early decades, was feeding itself and its dignity. Then the pendulum swung. By the close of the 1960s, the allure of the city became a siren song that no rural development plan could counter. Military rulers and democratic governments alike fell in love with the chimneys of industry, the glitter of urban real estate, the apparent efficiency of concentrating wealth in a few metropolitan nodes.
The message, whether spoken or not, was clear: the village is the past. The city is the future. Public investment followed this logic relentlessly. New hospitals, universities, flyovers, and factories bloomed in Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Karachi, while the countryside watched its canals silt up and its dispensaries run out of paracetamol. The result is a landscape of extraordinary imbalance. Today, agriculture contributes roughly a fifth of Pakistan’s national wealth yet employs nearly two-fifths of its people. This is the mathematics of poverty disguised as work: too many hands chasing too little productivity. Meanwhile, the cities that once promised salvation have become monuments to exhaustion. Karachi, a metropolis of staggering resilience, now buckles under the weight of informal settlements where sanitation is a private negotiation and drinking water arrives on tankers at extortionate prices.
The very migrants who sought opportunity find themselves trapped in new forms of precarity, trading the predictable hardships of the village for the chaotic cruelties of the urban slum. And still they come. Because what awaits them in the village if they stay? Land inequality, entrenched over generations, means that most rural households farm scraps or work as landless laborers for wages that cannot keep pace with inflation. The Green Revolution, for all its short-lived bounty, deepened these divides: the richer farmer bought the tube-well and the hybrid seed; the poorer one sank further into debt. Rural schools, where they function, rarely teach skills relevant to a diversified economy. Rural health posts, where they exist, often lack a single female doctor. This is not neglect by accident. It is neglect by design, a slow-motion withdrawal of the state from the places where most of its citizens still live.
The way forward requires not a rejection of cities but a rebalancing of national priorities. Pakistan needs a Rural Transformation Framework that treats the countryside not as a reservoir of cheap labor but as a legitimate frontier of economic opportunity. This begins with the small and the mundane: a paved road that does not wash away in the first monsoon, a reliable electricity connection for a cold storage unit, a broadband tower that allows a young woman to offer online tutoring. None of this is glamorous. None of it will feature in a military parade. But it is the slow, stubborn work of genuine development. Consider the potential of agro-processing. Pakistan grows mangoes that are the envy of the world, yet a third rot before reaching market.
A network of decentralized, village-level processing units could change that, creating jobs and reducing waste. Consider livestock: the dairy sector alone could absorb millions of young workers if supported with veterinary services and formal market access. Consider the rise of secondary cities: instead of every ambitious villager heading straight for the megacity, why not invest in places like Sialkot or Sukkur as regional hubs that can offer opportunity without the soul-crushing congestion? We have done this before. The Basic Democracies system, for all its flaws under Ayub Khan, proved that local government can work when given genuine fiscal and administrative authority. The lesson of Akhtar Hameed Khan was not that the state should step back, but that it should step forward differently, as a partner rather than a patron.
A revived local governance structure, with elected councils controlling meaningful budgets, could rebuild the trust that has frayed over decades of centralization. Climate resilience must also be woven into this new vision. The floods of 2022 were not a natural disaster in the pure sense; they were a man-made one, exacerbated by degraded drainage systems, deforested catchments, and settlements built on floodplains because no alternative land was available. Rural development without climate adaptation is merely a deferred invoice for suffering. Let us be clear about what is at stake. A Pakistan that continues to neglect its villages is a Pakistan that will never escape the trap of low growth, high informality, and chronic instability. But a Pakistan that reinvests in its rural heartland, that sees the farmer and the landless laborer and the village schoolteacher not as backward burdens but as the nation’s original entrepreneurs, can still write a different story.
(The writer is an expert in Safely Management of Sanitation in Pakistan, and Executive Director at Integrated Regional Support Program in KPK. He can be reached at editorial@metro-morning.com)
