PAKISTAN increasingly functions as two parallel societies. One purchases solutions from the private market whenever public institutions fail. The other remains dependent on the very institutions that have deteriorated through decades of neglect. They share the same constitution, the same laws and the same national identity, but their daily experience of citizenship is fundamentally different. The most consequential divide in Pakistan today is not between provinces, ethnicities or even income groups. It is between those who can exit failing public systems and those who cannot.
Call it the great secession. Over the past two decades, a substantial and growing portion of Pakistan’s population, not only the wealthy but the anxious middle class, has quietly with-drawn from public provision. Their children attend private schools. Their families seek treatment in private hospitals or travel abroad for serious illness. Their neighbourhoods are gated, their water is bottled, their electricity is backed by generators or solar panels, their security is contracted. When the state fails to deliver and it fails reliably, they do not protest. They purchase a substitute. And each time they do, they move a little further from any stake in whether public institutions ever improve. The exit is rational at the individual level. At the national level, it is catastrophic.
The numbers make the scale of this visible. Pakistan spends just 0.8 percent of GDP on edu-cation, a record low confirmed by the Pakistan Economic Survey 2024-25 and less than a fifth of the UNESCO-recommended benchmark of 04 to 06 percent. Twenty million children aged five to sixteen remain out of school, according to the government’s own HIES survey of January 2026, still the second-highest number in the world. Of those who do pass through the system, 67.5 percent of the total population never reach matriculation and only 9.39 percent hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. Meanwhile, private school enrolment at the primary level has climbed past 34 percent. Two parallel education systems now produce children who share a citizenship but are being shaped for entirely different futures: one equipped with English, technology and global ambition; the other struggling with overcrowded classrooms, absent teachers and a curriculum designed for a world that no longer exists.
Healthcare completes the diagnosis in more visceral terms. Pakistan spends 0.9 percent of GDP on public health, against the WHO’s recommended 05 percent for universal coverage. The distance this creates is not abstract. Per capita government health expenditure in Lahore exceeds $70 but falls below $1 in 24 out of 36 districts in Punjab alone. Life expectancy sits at 67.6 years, four years below the South Asian average. Infant mortality stands at 50.1 deaths per thousand live births against a regional average of 30.2. Those with resources by-pass the public system entirely, often before it can fail them. Those without absorb every failure, the missing medicines, the absent doctors, the broken equipment, as a private catas-trophe with no political consequence for anyone who matters.
Drive fifteen minutes from a DHA in Karachi, Lahore or Rawalpindi and the country changes completely. Gated communities with private roads, private security and uninterrupted utilities sit beside neighbourhoods of deteriorating infrastructure and chronic neglect. The housing deficit stands at over ten million units. The geography of Pakistani cities has become the geography of Pakistani inequality, not a gradual gradient but a hard border between those the state serves and those it has abandoned.
Political consequence of this exit is the most dangerous dimension of all. Public institutions improve when powerful people depend on them. They decline when the educated and in-fluential have already found alternatives. Pakistan’s policymakers, legislators and senior bureaucrats largely educate their children privately, seek healthcare privately and live in privately managed communities. They are not without sympathy for public institutions, but they experience their failures as a social problem rather than a personal emergency. The feedback loop that drives reform in functioning democracies, elite dissatisfaction converted into institutional pressure, has been severed. What remains is a public system that serves only those with no alternative, administered by people who have never needed to use it. That is not a recipe for reform but for permanent managed decline.
Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century historian and philosopher, argued that civilizations do not collapse from external conquest alone. They hollow out first, when the sense of shared purpose between the governing and the governed dissolves, when those with power no longer feel bound by the same fate as those without it. He called this the decay of asabiyyah, the social solidarity that holds a people together. Pakistan is not in collapse but it is hollowing. The motorways are being built, the housing schemes are rising, the glass towers are going up. What is not being built and what no infrastructure budget can substitute for, is shared life with institutions that serve citizens regardless of income, public spaces that belong to everyone and a sense that the nation is experienced collectively rather than separately.
Until those institutions exist in daily practice rather than policy documents, Pakistan will remain a country of parallel realities, with its citizens growing less familiar with one another’s lives each year. That estrangement is not merely a social concern but an existential one. A nation whose capable classes no longer believe in its shared institutions will eventually lose the capacity to rebuild them.
—The writer is PhD in Political Science, and visiting faculty at QAU
Islamabad.
