Published: July 21, 2026 | Category: Development

Six of Punjab’s ten poorest districts lie in the south. Because Pakistan’s poverty index is built mostly from schooling and health, it doubles as a scorecard for provincial service delivery.

Poverty in South Punjab is usually explained as a growth lag — a region that industry and irrigation passed by. The Multidimensional Poverty Index tells a different story. Six of Punjab’s ten poorest districts sit in the south, and the index that ranks them is assembled mainly from services a provincial government is supposed to provide.

District	MPI headcount (poor, %)
Muzaffargarh	64.8
Rajanpur	64.4
Dera Ghazi Khan	63.7

What the Index Actually Measures

The MPI is not an income line. It counts deprivations, and in Pakistan’s version education carries 41.3 per cent of the weight and health 27.6 per cent — so close to seven-tenths of the score rests on schooling, teachers, clinics and skilled care at birth. These are not accidents of the market. They are line items in a budget.

Poverty as a Budget Output

Read that way, a district’s MPI headcount is less a measure of how poor its people are by income than a record of what the state has failed to build there. When two in three residents of Muzaffargarh are counted as multidimensionally poor, the number is describing missing schools and absent clinics as much as empty pockets.

Living standards — the third component — add sanitation, clean water, cooking fuel and housing to the same picture, and South Punjab scores poorly there too. But it is the education and health weights that dominate, and both are squarely the province’s responsibility. A child out of school in Rajanpur and a birth without a skilled attendant in Muzaffargarh are not market failures. They are the absence of a school and a clinic that a budget was meant to fund.

The Northern Contrast

The same index ranks Punjab’s central and northern districts far higher, and the gap owes little to soil or rainfall. Lahore, Rawalpindi and Sialkot cleared their deprivations because spending, industry and schools arrived there first and kept arriving. South Punjab’s headcounts are the mirror image, recording what was never funded as a poverty statistic years later. The index is slow, but it is honest: it tallies the cumulative choice of where the state chose to be present and where it did not.

That reframing changes the remedy. If poverty in South Punjab were purely a growth lag, the cure would be factories and time. Because it is largely a delivery outcome, it can be moved by a budget — provided the budget is spent where the deprivation is. The map of the region’s poverty is, to a first approximation, the map of where public services were not delivered, which is why the allocation and execution failures are not administrative footnotes but the mechanism of the poverty itself.

Sources

• National Multidimensional Poverty Index of Pakistan (Planning Commission with UNDP and OPHI)
• Punjab Bureau of Statistics