Brain drain - what you should know about Pakistan
Pakistan
Skilled professionals including doctors and engineers are leaving country
LAHORE (Dunya Investigation Cell) – More and more young and educated people are moving abroad to secure their future, which can be borne out by statistics.
The fact is that the number of people settling abroad is rising with every passing day.
In the first six months of the ongoing year (January-June), as many as 15,000 engineers, 1,500 doctors and 1,400 IT professionals have left the country for the sake of better future – in total, around 395,000 moved out of the country.
In 2020, around 225,000 moved out of the country, in 2021 (288,000) and in 2022, the numbers skyrocketed to 832,000.
In terms of provinces, most who went out of the country belonged to Punjab. Their number totals 223,000. As many as 116,000 people have left KP followed by Sindh (30,946), Azad Kashmir (15,100) and Balochistan (4,000).
As for the cities, most people moved out of Sialkot (16,988), Dera Ghazi Khan (16,814), Lahore (15,504), Gujranwala (14,530), Faisalabad (13,100), Karachi (12,950), Swat (12, 039) and Islamabad (4,513).
Most people who left the country moved to Gulf nations – a majority went to Saudi Arabia (186,000), followed by the UAE (100,676), Qatar (32,600), Oman (29,405) and Bahrain (6,322).
As many as 4,920 people moved to Britian, 2,525 to Greece, 1,100 to South Korea and 499 moved to the United States.
What is surprising is that remittances are decreasing as people are moving abroad. In the financial year 2022-23, almost remittances of $27.2 billion were ecorded - $4.2 billion less than fiscal year 2021-22.
In terms of professions of people who moved abroad, most are labourers (169,000), drivers (85,000), managers (19,499), salesmen (12,0000), technicians (12,649), mechanics (5,000) and electricians (8,547).
In terms of skilled professionals, most are engineers (4,015), accountants (2,011) and doctors (1,583).
Almost 10.28 million Pakistanis have settled abroad since 1971 – most (946,571) moved out in 2015.
