Hangor’s price: What Pakistan’s submarines cost in human terms

In fiscal year 2024, the World Bank estimated that Pakistan’s poverty rate had reached 40.5 per cent — measured at $3.65 per person per day in 2017 purchasing power parity terms — with an additional 2.6 million Pakistanis falling below the poverty line. In the same period, Pakistan was advancing the induction of its first advanced submarine class, at a programme cost its government has never publicly disclosed but which independent analysts consistently estimate at $4 to $5 billion for all eight vessels.

The coexistence of mass poverty and major weapons acquisition is not unique to Pakistan. But the scale of the contradiction — and the political silence that surrounds it — is worth examining directly.

The contrast becomes sharper when the submarine programme is viewed in comparative fiscal terms rather than as an abstract procurement figure. Even using the lower end of the estimated programme cost — approximately $4 billion — the amount corresponds to a substantial share of Pakistan’s annual federal development spending in recent years and exceeds the annual public expenditure of several social sectors combined. The issue is not whether states should maintain armed forces; every state does. The question is whether procurement choices are occurring within a transparent framework that allows citizens to evaluate opportunity costs.

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Pakistan’s Hangor-class acquisition is designed as a long-horizon strategic investment rather than a one-time purchase. Eight submarines are planned, with construction divided between Chinese shipyards and domestic production facilities. The first vessel entered service in 2026, and the programme is expected to continue over several years, extending both capital expenditure and life-cycle maintenance obligations beyond the initial acquisition phase. Estimates from defence analysts continue to place total programme costs in the range of $4-5 billion. This means that the economic implications of the decision cannot be understood purely through annual budget documents.

The Numbers Behind the Human Cost

Pakistan ranks 109th out of 127 countries in the 2024 Global Hunger Index. Nearly half of an average household’s monthly expenditure goes towards food, and 82 per cent of the population cannot afford a healthy diet. These are not figures from the country’s most vulnerable provinces alone — they describe the national condition.

Food spending patterns highlight another aspect of vulnerability. When nearly half of household expenditure goes towards food, even small inflation shocks can lead to noticeable declines in nutrition. This triggers a chain reaction: households first cut back on diet quality, then healthcare, and finally educational expenses. Economists refer to this as a coping sequence, where immediate survival choices gradually undermine long-term human capital development.

Pakistan’s labour market data and demographic profile make this particularly consequential. With a young population and persistent underemployment, investments in nutrition and educational outcomes yield unusually high returns compared with those in countries with older demographic structures. Child stunting and food insecurity therefore serve not only as humanitarian indicators but also as predictors of future productivity losses.

Between November 2024 and March 2025, approximately 11 million people in Pakistan’s rural population experienced high levels of acute food insecurity — IPC Phase 3 or above — including 1.7 million classified as facing emergency levels. The analysis covered 68 rural districts across Balochistan, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, representing roughly 20 per cent of Pakistan’s total population, indicating that the crisis in those districts is structural, not exceptional.

On child nutrition, Pakistan has the second-highest prevalence of stunting in South Asia, after Afghanistan. Pakistan’s global acute malnutrition rate is 17.7 per cent, exceeding emergency thresholds, and the severe wasting rate among children aged 6 to 59 months is 6 per cent. These are not lagging indicators from a decade ago. They are current measures of a population in which a significant proportion of children are not receiving adequate nutrition during the developmental window that determines the rest of their lives.

The Fiscal Architecture of the Trade-Off

Pakistan’s 2025-26 federal budget increased defence spending by more than 20 per cent, to Rs 2.55 trillion ($9 billion), while overall spending fell by 7 per cent compared with the previous fiscal year. Health, education, and infrastructure programmes all took direct hits to make room for military allocations, at a time when Pakistan remained under sustained IMF pressure to reduce subsidies and tighten public spending.

The defence budget increased by 14 per cent in 2022-23, 15.4 per cent in 2023-24, 17.6 per cent the following year, and by 20.2 per cent in 2025-26 — all during years when Pakistan was on the verge of default, inflation was nearing 40 per cent, and poverty and unemployment were rising. After debt servicing, which accounts for more than 45 per cent of the total budget, defence is the second-largest expenditure item in Pakistan’s federal budget.

Budget composition matters as much as headline spending totals. Defence allocations are only one component of Pakistan’s fiscal structure, yet they operate within a system where debt servicing consumes the largest share of expenditure, leaving limited room for discretionary social investment. The resulting compression disproportionately affects sectors whose benefits emerge over years rather than electoral cycles.

The pattern has become more evident in recent budgets. Pakistan’s proposed 2026-27 budget again prioritised defence and debt obligations while limiting development expenditure amid continued IMF-linked fiscal constraints, indicating that increases in military spending are occurring within a broader environment of expenditure restraint rather than expanding public capacity.

The political economy of this asymmetry is well understood: Pakistan’s military establishment has consistently secured budgetary protection that civilian social ministries have not. The consequence is not merely an abstract misallocation — it is a measurable worsening of the conditions that produce child stunting, maternal malnutrition, and household food insecurity.

The Security Debate Pakistan Needs

The Pakistani government maintains that defence spending is non-negotiable because the security threats the country faces are existential. Following Pakistan’s most serious confrontation with India in nearly three decades, the government cited national security imperatives to justify the budget increase. This argument warrants engagement, not dismissal. The threats are real, the regional context is volatile, and the 2025 escalation demonstrated that the risks are not hypothetical.

Supporters of higher defence expenditure would argue that these trade-offs are being assessed too narrowly. Pakistan’s security establishment has long maintained that deterrence failures carry costs that dwarf peacetime social expenditure. In that view, advanced naval capability is not a luxury but insurance against strategic coercion in an increasingly contested maritime environment.

That argument deserves serious consideration because its underlying premise is not irrational. States facing persistent security competition rarely reduce defence allocations voluntarily. Yet the policy question remains whether external deterrence and internal resilience are being optimised together, or whether one has become structurally insulated from public scrutiny while the other absorbs repeated fiscal adjustment.

But genuine security is multidimensional. A state in which 40 per cent of the population lives in poverty, the majority of citizens cannot afford a nutritionally adequate diet, and children are stunted at rates that exceed regional averages — that state is not secure. It is fragile in ways no submarine fleet can address.

The question that Pakistan’s public institutions are not currently structured to ask is whether the balance between external deterrence and internal human security is correctly calibrated — and whether, in the absence of public accountability for major procurement decisions, Pakistani citizens are in a position to make that determination for themselves.

(The author is a senior journalist and writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)