Drowning the future

THE floods are visiting us again. The death toll will be counted within days. The damage to roads, bridges and embankments will be tallied within weeks and translated into a dollar figure. Expect this assessment to dominate the coverage. It is legitimate but a wrong ledger regardless. The real casualty of this flood, and the one before it, and the one before that, is not standing in the rubble. It is sitting in a classroom that no longer exists, or should be sitting there and is not. Pakistan is a country where 40 per cent of the population is under 15, where 93 million children are of school age, where the state has for years spent less than one per cent of GDP on health and less than 2pc…