Independence Without Inheritance

Asem Mustafa Awan

Islamabad: The smiles are bright, the flags small, and the feet bare. In tattered clothes some with frayed collars, others with sleeves too short children in green and white wave their Independence Day banners with pride and excitement.

Their joy is pure, unfiltered and painfully fragile. For too many of them, the years ahead will bring hunger, illness, and hardship, conditions so entrenched they have become part of the national landscape.

Nearly half of Pakistan’s people now live below the poverty line. Millions of children are born without formal identification, leaving them invisible to the state and locked out of the rights and protections citizenship should bring. This is not the result of a single bad decade—it is the outcome of policy priorities that have failed the most vulnerable since the earliest years of the republic.

From the 1950s, state spending favored monumental architecture over mass literacy. The 1960s pushed industrial growth while rural schools and clinics languished. The 1970s brought ambitious political slogans, but basic health coverage and sanitation lagged behind.

The 1980s and 1990s deepened inequality through uneven urban development, leaving swathes of the countryside without functioning infrastructure. Even in the 21st century, budgets have leaned toward motorways, metro lines, and prestige projects rather than primary education, clean water, and maternal health.

These children are not exceptions—they are the rule for millions growing up undocumented, undernourished, and unseen. The predictable result is classrooms without teachers, clinics without medicines, taps without water, and, all too often, children without shoes. In rural communities, the absence of state investment forces families into impossible choices: send a child to work or watch the family go hungry.

Poverty and illiteracy together create a generational trap. Without education, these children are more vulnerable to exploitation, child labor, and early marriage. For some, the dream of escape leads to perilous migration journeys; in recent years, countless young Pakistanis have drowned in overloaded boats bound for Europe, chasing the opportunities denied to them at home.

Independence promised dignity, justice, and opportunity. But for children waving flags in the dust—barefoot, in shirts worn thin by years, and trousers patched at the knees—that promise remains an illusion. Their smiles shine with the innocence of those too young to know how the odds are stacked against them.

And unless the nation learns to measure progress not by roads and monuments but by the health, education, and safety of its children, those small green flags will remain symbols of a freedom they will never truly inherit.