By format, by topic

In Pakistan's provincial surveys, fewer than one in five women who said they had been physically attacked reported that the police were told. Court records show how allegations can remain unresolved when accused people abscond, and how verdicts can remain contested for years.

Taxes reach Pakistan's households through everyday purchases as well as earnings. Using the 2024–25 household survey and that year's tax rules, we estimate how selected taxes, cash assistance and electricity support vary with living standards and income source. The results show a burden that rises with spending, largely because of salary tax, but is broadly flat across most of the income distribution.

Export-led growth is the right ambition, but the engine that will deliver it never gets built. Two new household surveys show why.

Ahmadis made up 0.07 per cent of the population recorded by religion in the 2023 census, but 26 per cent of the people the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) recorded as accused of blasphemy between 2020 and 2025, including 141 of 362 in 2025. Most recorded accusations came from Punjab and Sindh; district totals cannot show whether accusations are followed by minority communities shrinking.

Across South Asia, citizens continue to protest even as democratic institutions weaken. Some movements have forced leaders from office; others have won concessions or sustained opposition under repression.

In April 1952, Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly voted 41 to 12 to postpone a decision on recognising Bengali as a state language. Ten of the 12 who opposed delay also voted for both representation across communities and protections for non-Muslim personal laws. For them, recognising more than one language was part of recognising more than one kind of Pakistani.

Women’s turnout trailed men’s by about nine percentage points in 2024, close to the gap in 2018. It was nearly eighteen in Pashto-majority seats and eleven or more in the selected urban seats of most cities examined. A similar national average concealed different movements across the country.

Millions of Pakistanis face long journeys to a health facility. Longer journeys are associated with fewer births taking place in a facility. What shorter journeys would mean for newborn survival is less certain.

Between 2018–19 and 2024–25, average household spending in the middle of Pakistan’s consumption distribution roughly doubled in rupees, while real spending per person fell by around 5 per cent. The fall reached almost every line of the budget, food included.

Beyond primary level, girls’ government schools are farther away than boys’ schools in three out of four mapped districts. Where girls’ schools are farther away, fewer girls tend to be enrolled.

Female participation in the labour force has climbed three points in four years. Some of that is women going to work; some is the count finally finding them. Neither, yet, is the kind of work that makes the economy more productive.

Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan polled 2.9mn votes in 2024 and won no National Assembly seat. In 69 seats, it polled more votes than separated the winner from the runner-up. That count shows where the party’s voters could have mattered, not where they did.

Among households with unschooled parents, median consumption is 59 per cent higher where a grown child has a degree than where none attended school. Nevertheless, nearly half of those graduate households still sit below the national median.

Goods exports and remittances tracked each other from 2018 to 2024. Then they diverged: exports stood still but remittances did not.

How a computer sorts text into categories, why one label per text is often the wrong design, and what it takes to turn a classifier’s labels into a count worth publishing.

How a grid becomes an estimate of access to care. Follow the calculation, practise population weighting, and learn what a travel-time average can—and cannot—tell you.

Night-time lights promise poverty measurement at any resolution. Information theory — explained here — says when more granular data means more, and when it is only noise.

I want a Pakistan in which belonging is secure enough to accommodate disagreement, and citizenship gives people a real claim on the state.

Pakistan’s inequalities run through what the state can collect, whom it can identify and the services it can provide. Where public provision falls short, families must find their own way across.

Why Adaad exists, what it promises each month, and the modest freedom it adds: data free to check, to question and to reuse.

Two districts in Sindh: their reported forced conversions and abductions, minority populations, and figures on poverty, education, marriage, crime and the courts.

Among Pakistan’s districts the poverty headcount runs from 9.6 per cent in Rawalpindi to 93.8 in Khuzdar, where nearly every poor household lacks clean fuel, sanitation and adequate housing at once. The two components that read low in Khuzdar, water and electricity, are facts about the questionnaire.

Every indicator in this issue for one district, set against its province and the country.