Pakistan is in the throes of a serious and monumental crisis that is the flight of educated youth or brain drain from the country. So far the Government seems to have adopted an ostrich like attitude and seems oblivious to this impending crisis as no attention is being paid to check this trend or to address the causes and ramifications of the brain drain from the country. According to a report published in the Financial Daily about 0.9 million young Pakistanis left the country during 2023 which was the second highest exodus since 1971. According to the figures released by the Bureau of immigration and Overseas Employment 789,837 people went abroad for employment in 2024. Reasons for this massive flood of people flying abroad are pretty apparent.
Apart from bleak socio economic conditions we have an absence of growth and a stagnant economy coupled with political instability and lack of political decorum in our political parties and the top leadership are the main contributing factors for this rather sorry state of affairs.
During the last decade millions of educated youth have flown away in search of greener pastures and not only unskilled labour but engineers, doctors, IT professionals and Hi-Tech experts have joined this throng of highly educated youth who believe that Pakistan is no longer a place to make a career and does not offer enough opportunities for growth and economic progress.
Millions of labourers and semi-skilled youngsters are on the lookout for opportunities to leave the country and sometimes even risk their lives by using the services of human traffickers to reach foreign countries for better opportunities. NADRA today is flooded with over 40000 passport applications per day and faces a huge back log in issuing new passports to the desperate applicants applying for travel documents. In a population 250 million that is increasing by 2.4 percent per year the rate of migration is phenomenal. Students who go abroad for studies rarely come back even those sent on Government funded scholarships try to stay back and there have been cases of PIA crew members slipping away in foreign cites. There is an immediate and urgent need to restore and confidence in the system of governance, encourage talent and eradicate favouritism, cronyism along with nepotism to stop this flight of young educated youth from the country.
Pakistan is blessed with innumerable high achievers with great talents in many fields but today the country faces a great challenge of brain drain. This exodus of highly qualified and educated youth from the country looking for better financial security, higher living standards and the fruits of stable socio-economic and politically stable environment has an adverse impact on the economic development of the country. Pakistani citizens have proved to be a great assets for many countries of the world but their own home country has not been able to capitalize on this great pool of talents for a number of reasons. Pakistan’s productive and priceless human resource is fleeing abroad instead of making any valuable contribution to the progress and development of their own country. One main cause of brain drain is that the salary structure at home is not commensurate with the youth’s abilities and performance, lack of research facilities and absence of merit-based employment opportunities. This brain drain is having a catastrophic impact on the socio-economic and political development of the country. This results in a very negative effect on skill development and there is a loss of funds for training and education. The loss of strategic manpower also results in development of intellectual environment, infrastructural development and loss in existing and future technologies.
The majority of students attending domestic or international institutions are being drawn into profitable foreign employment marketplaces as a result of the unstable job market that has very few opportunities to offer and that too in limited areas. Professionals in Pakistan desire to work where they are compensated fairly for their qualifications and abilities. Pakistan is exporting its productive human resource because more and more intelligent educated and talented people are flying away to seek employment abroad. According to a report by the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment there has been a 300% increase in the people going abroad from the year 2022 to 2023.
This includes 5534 engineers 18000 associated electrical engineers 2500 doctors 2000 computer experts, 6500 accountants, 2600 agriculture experts, 900 teachers, 12000 computer professionals, 1600 nurses and this is just the tip of the iceberg because figures for previous years have not been released. Ironically the Government and state agencies are complicit in this brain drain. The official version is that all those Pakistanis who get employment abroad remit foreign exchange and thus prop up the national economy and also this flight of talent decreases the pressures on the local job market.
Ironically both these arguments are false because no matter how many dollars our boys and girls remit from abroad they are never enough and do not really help the economy. People with training and skills are a highly limited resource for developing nations. These nations’ development is halted if they lose them. In fact, several nations have been forced to recruit pricey consultants from abroad because they lost their brightest minds and to the industrial world.
No amount of foreign remittances can make up for this loss. Brain drain results in the loss of creativity, inventions, intellectual grooming and the nation is left devoid of its qualified, trained and talented youth and scholars.
The impact of brain drain on our economy is now pretty obvious and needs to be tackled on a war footing. If this issue is not addressed immediately and planning is done to deal with this national loss the country will suffer severe consequences and damages
—The writer is Professor of History, based in Islamabad.
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