Independent data journalism on Pakistan. Adaad reads the numbers behind the economy, workforce and society. Every story names its sources, publishes its data and explains its limits.
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.
Read the lead storyEverything below the line is tax paid and everything above it is public money received, both as a share of what the household spends. The black line is the balance. Switch the chart to the income ranking and the top of the distribution changes places with the bottom.
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.
Read the letter →Half the country is eight minutes from a clinic. The fifth of Pakistanis living in the poorest districts are nine times further out, and 16.4 million people are more than an hour from care by any motor vehicle.
Darker is further from the nearest hospital or clinic. Switch to walking and most of the map darkens: 125 million people are more than an hour from care on foot, against 16.4 million with a vehicle. Drag the threshold to count the people beyond it.
Between 2018–19 and 2024–25, the household in the middle of Pakistan’s consumption distribution doubled what it spent in rupees and bought around 5 per cent less per person. The cut reached almost every line of the budget, food included.
Each point is a spending category. Left of the vertical line it took a smaller slice of the budget; below the horizontal one the household bought less of it. Food sits low and to the right: a bigger share of the budget, and 12 per cent less of it.
In the quarter of districts that built fewest girls’ schools, 35.1 per cent of girls are in school and the gap to boys is 12.9 percentage points. In the quarter that built most, 71.0 per cent and 2.1 points.
Each dot is a district, coloured by province. Where girls’ schools are a fifth of the government network, a third of girls are in school; where they are half of it, seven in ten. Switch to the enrolment gap to see the shortfall against boys shrink the same way.
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.
Each bar is a group of households whose parents never went to school, sorted by the schooling of their grown child. The capsule is the middle half, the notch the median. The dashed line is where a graduate child’s household sits when the parents did go to school.
A short, thoughtful reading of the numbers shaping Pakistan. The next issue lands Wednesday 14 October 2026.