The Human Cost of Pakistan's Brain Drain: Families, Funerals, and 25,000 Bodies a Year

What the State Bank's monthly press release leaves out

By Asad Baig • Written from outside Pakistan • May 2026 • Approx. 9-min read

The State Bank of Pakistan publishes a number every month and the headlines call it good news. $38.5 billion in remittances in fiscal year 2024-25. A record $4.1 billion in March 2025 alone. The government celebrates. The Minister tweets. The talk show panel applauds.

I have written the bigger argument in Pakistan Brain Drain: The Graveyard of Remittancers. This piece is for one specific question. What does that $38.5 billion actually cost, in human terms?

What is the human cost of Pakistan's brain drain?

The human cost of Pakistan's brain drain is around 25,000 bodies repatriated annually from the Gulf alone, hundreds of thousands of separated families, children growing up without fathers, and 6,500+ documented South Asian migrant deaths in Qatar between 2010 and 2020. The remittance numbers measure the survivors. The graveyard measures everyone else.

The 25,000 bodies a year

Pakistan repatriates around 25,000 bodies a year from the Gulf states. Most of these men left Pakistan healthy and young. They returned as cargo on the same flights they once boarded with hope.

The Guardian's 2021 investigation, using embassy data from five South Asian countries, documented more than 6,500 migrant worker deaths in Qatar alone between 2010 and 2020. Most were classified as "natural causes" or "cardiac arrest." That language is doing a lot of work , a 28-year-old Pakistani electrician collapsing on a Riyadh site in July at 1pm, after a 14-hour shift in 50°C heat, is not dying of natural causes. He is dying of preventable industrial conditions a Western country would jail an employer for.

Pakistan is the graveyard of the remittancers. The country that exhausted them in life finally welcomes them back. In a coffin.

The Gulf does not want their corpses. The West sometimes accepts the body but the family wants the burial in the village near the grandparents. So home becomes the destination of last resort. Not for living. For dying.

What the airport actually contains

I have spend 8 years outside the Pakistan. I have seen what the departure lounge actually contains. The state has not.

I saw people crying in departure lounge in the airport. I see people of Eid in foreign countries , or any other festival , the video call to their home is the total celebration.

A wife stay back in Pakistan, at what cost? And children without father, how much they feel and cry on airports?

This is not a statistic anyone in the Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis will ever publish. There is no annual report titled "How Many Pakistani Children Cried at Departures This Year." There is no KPI for "average years a wife waited for her husband to come home for good."

The remittance figure is not the achievement. The remittance figure is the receipt for a transaction the country pretended not to make.

Imagine you are a 38-year-old electrician from Gujranwala. Your daughter was three when you left for Riyadh. You have seen her grow up through a phone screen. Every two years you come home for thirty days. Then back. The remittance the State Bank reports each month is your daughter's childhood, converted to dollars.

The kafala system, in plain English

Approximately 2.6+ million Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia and 950,000+ in the UAE live under the kafala system. Kafala is Arabic for "sponsorship." In practice, it is something else.

Under kafala:

• The worker's legal residency is tied to a single employer
• The worker cannot change jobs without employer permission
• The worker often cannot leave the country without employer permission
• The employer often confiscates the passport upon arrival
• The worker's wages and conditions are at the employer's discretion
• There is no right to form unions or strike

The UN Special Rapporteur, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all called the kafala system a modern form of slavery. The Pakistani worker who sends home the remittance the government celebrates is, in many cases, legally trapped while doing it. I have written the longer explainer at What Is the Kafala System and Why Pakistanis Suffer Under It.

The 53 issues every Pakistani worker faces

Researchers, NGOs, and the ILO have documented at least 53 separate categories of exploitation Pakistani migrant workers face abroad:

• Predatory recruitment fees of 2 to 6 months of wages upfront
• False contract promises in Arabic documents the worker cannot read
• Wage theft and delayed payments of 1 to 6 months
• Excessive overtime without compensation, 12 to 16 hour days
• Heat stroke in 50°C summers
• Cramped labour camps with communal toilets
• Withheld medical care for workplace injuries
• Documented sexual harassment of female domestic workers
• Verbal and physical abuse
• Racism using "Bengali," "Hindi," and "Pakistani" as slurs
• Up to 40 percent of Gulf workers without health insurance
• No pension contributions, no retirement protection
• Bodies stuck in morgues for weeks
• Repatriation costs imposed on families
• No life insurance for most workers

Every issue listed above has been solved by other countries. The Philippines built mandatory OWWA insurance, labour attachés at every major embassy, 24/7 hotlines. India built Indian Workers Resource Centres in Riyadh, Sharjah, Doha, and a Madad portal. Pakistan has neither.

The doctors who never came back

Pakistan loses approximately 80 percent of its trained medical doctors within five years of graduation. One in three Pakistani medical students reports an intention to migrate.

In 2024 to 2025 alone:

• ~5,000 doctors left Pakistan
• ~1,640 nurses (registered through BEOE)
• Nurse emigration rose 2,144 percent between 2011 and 2024

The state subsidises a doctor's training for 7 to 10 years at an estimated $25,000 per doctor in public funds. With ~10,000 doctors emigrating annually, Pakistan loses around $250 million per year in pure training investment alone.

The bodies that come back are not the only body count. There is a quieter body count at home: the patients who never got the doctor.

A 2020 peer-reviewed study by Saluja et al. estimated the global mortality cost of physician migration from low- and middle-income countries at approximately $15.86 billion annually. The greatest costs are incurred by India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and South Africa. These are the deaths that occur because doctors who could have served their home populations are working elsewhere.

You have read about the bodies that come back from Riyadh. You should also know about the woman in Quetta who died in childbirth because the obstetrician took the Saudi job.

The families left behind

Pakistan's brain drain is overwhelmingly male. Female labour force participation in Pakistan is around 21 percent, one of the lowest in the world. The vast majority of the 762,499 Pakistanis who migrated in 2025 were men.

So the social cost falls on the women left behind. Wives raising children alone for years at a time. Elderly parents waiting for sons who come home for thirty days every two years, if at all. Daughters whose first words were learned over a phone screen.

The state does not have a category for this in its national accounts. There is no "loneliness GDP," no "missed weddings index," no "elderly parent bedside hours" tracked by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. But it is the actual texture of the remittance economy.

Why the embassy makes it worse

The sad part is, neither the people left behind, neither the people working outside , the government has no plans for them other than remittance and IMF loan. Just take their money, and then who are you? The ordinary green passport citizen.

A peer-reviewed PMC study in 2023 documented this directly: "Interviewees commented on the Pakistan embassy in Qatar's 'unwillingness to help' to protect the rights of Pakistani migrants in the country, compared with embassies of other sending countries including Bangladesh and Nepal."

Bangladesh and Nepal. Smaller economies. Fewer resources. More willing to fight for their workers than Pakistan is. I have written the comparison at Why Pakistan's Embassies Fail Their Own Workers.

What the solution looks like

The 25,000-a-year figure is not a problem without precedent or solution. Other countries have done what Pakistan has not done.

What Pakistan needs	What it would do
Mandatory worker insurance (Philippines OWWA model)	Death and injury compensation, repatriation costs covered
Labour attachés at every major Gulf embassy	Wage protection, contract enforcement, grievance handling
Madad-equivalent grievance portal	Track every complaint from filing to resolution
Bilateral Labour Agreements with wage floors	Close the 15-35% Pakistani-Indian wage gap
Repatriation of body as default consular service	End the family's burden of paying to bring back their dead

None of this is exotic. The Philippines has done it for 50 years. India has done it for 20 years. Pakistan has done it for 0 years. The full plan is at The Real Brain Gain Plan.

In closing

The remittance economy is presented as a national success story. The 25,000 bodies a year tell a different story. The departure lounge tells a different story. The wife in Faisalabad raising three children alone tells a different story. The Multan patient who died because the cardiologist took the Saudi job tells a different story.

Pakistan's brain drain is not an economic abstraction. It is a generation of people the state has chosen to consume rather than develop. The numbers measure the consumption. The graveyard measures the consequence.

We are not asking for paradise. We are asking for what every functioning country offers its citizens. Real salaries. Real safety. Real dignity at the embassy window. The decision to give us those things is a decision the state has refused to make for 78 years. We owe it to the next generation to keep refusing to look away.

, Asad Baig, written from outside Pakistan, May 2026

Frequently asked questions

How many Pakistani bodies are repatriated each year? Pakistan repatriates around 25,000 bodies a year from the Gulf states alone. Most of these men left Pakistan healthy and young. The Guardian's 2021 investigation found 6,500+ South Asian migrant deaths in Qatar alone between 2010 and 2020.

What is the kafala system? The kafala system is the sponsorship-based labour system used in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf states. It ties the worker's residency to a single employer, often results in passport confiscation, and has been called a modern form of slavery by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN Special Rapporteur.

How many Pakistani doctors leave Pakistan each year? Approximately 5,000 doctors emigrated from Pakistan between 2024 and 2025. Pakistan loses around 80 percent of its trained medical doctors within five years of graduation, and one in three Pakistani medical students reports an intention to migrate.

What is the mortality cost of physician migration from Pakistan? A peer-reviewed study by Saluja et al. (2020) estimated the global mortality cost of physician migration from low- and middle-income countries at approximately $15.86 billion annually, with the greatest costs incurred by India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and South Africa.

Why are Pakistani families separated by migration? Most overseas Pakistani workers, especially in the Gulf, are on temporary contracts under kafala that do not allow family inclusion. Combined with low female labour force participation in Pakistan (~21 percent) and Gulf visa rules, the result is millions of Pakistani men working abroad while their wives, children, and parents remain in Pakistan.

What does the Pakistani embassy do for its workers abroad? A peer-reviewed PMC study found Pakistan's Qatar embassy was rated as more unwilling to help its workers than the embassies of Bangladesh and Nepal. Pakistan has no equivalent to India's Indian Workers Resource Centres or the Philippines' OWWA insurance and labour attaché network.

Are migrant deaths in the Gulf properly investigated? Mostly no. The Guardian's investigation documented that most Pakistani and South Asian migrant deaths in Qatar were classified as "natural causes" or "cardiac arrest" , language that frequently masks heat-stroke deaths from working in 50°C summers without breaks. Pakistan's embassy has not contested the classifications systematically.

Sources and notes

• The Guardian , "Revealed: 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded," 2021
• Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment (BEOE) , Annual Migration Report 2025
• "Brain drain of healthcare professionals from Pakistan from 1971 to 2022," PMC, 2023
• "Protecting and promoting the rights of the 'reserve army of labour'," PMC, 2023
• Saluja et al. (2020) , "Mortality cost of physician migration from low/middle-income countries"
• Human Rights Watch , Migrant worker abuse documentation
• Amnesty International , Kafala system reports
• UN Special Rapporteur , Reports on migrant worker protections
• Pakistan Bureau of Statistics , Labour Force Survey 2020-21
• ILO Pakistan , Travel Smart Work Smart guides for Saudi Arabia and UAE, 2015
• Pace International Law Review , "Labor, Migration, and Power: The Kafala System Explained," 2026
• Atlantic Council South Asia Center , "How South Asian countries can protect their migrant workers abroad," 2022

Related reading

Pillar: Pakistan Brain Drain: The Graveyard of Remittancers

Sibling cluster posts:

• Why Pakistan's Remittance Economy Is a Development Trap
• Why Pakistani Workers Earn Less Than Indians for the Same Work in the Gulf
• The Real Brain Gain Plan: How Pakistan Can Bring Its Diaspora Home

Long-tail spokes under this cluster:

• How Many Pakistani Bodies Are Repatriated From Saudi Arabia Each Year
• What Is the Kafala System and Why Pakistanis Suffer Under It
• Why 80% of Pakistani Doctors Leave Within Five Years of Graduation

Thank you for reading.

, Asad Baig