The impact of a sustainable strategy will revolutionise industrial and academic foundations of the country
KARACHI: It is unfortunate to see that the Government of Pakistan has been primarily focused on implementing reforms and solutions that provide temporary solutions to the national economic issues. Somehow, the government is not able to devise better economic strategies that may ensure permanent solutions for major economic issues.
As there is a need to reduce the cost of agricultural production in the country, the government merely offered a subsidy on fertiliser prices. This is not a long-term solution for farmers. Experts have repeatedly advised that reducing the high taxes and gas infrastructure development cess on the fertiliser industry will bring down the costs of fertiliser production and help permanently lower the cost of cultivation. Therefore, the authorities must also think about providing natural gas and electricity at cheaper rates for fertiliser producers.
For other economic problems, too, the government has been opting for temporary solutions instead of rooting out the primary causes over the years. For example, while the Pakistani youth is faced with the dilemma of low quality education, the government should have taken concrete measures to improve the syllabus, hire competent faculty and develop instructor skills at every institution. However, the government has merely launched a scheme to distribute free laptops to a select category of students, thinking that it will solve a major problem like the low standard of education.
Millions of qualified graduates continue to suffer due to unemployment, but the only solution the government could come up with was to launch the Rozgar Cab Scheme. Instead of offering incentives and concessions to attract foreign direct investments and industrialisation, the government is simply distributing taxi cabs among unemployed people. This is not a solution to provide respectable livelihoods to qualified graduates. The authorities have failed to realise that they must encourage industrialisation on a large scale to create millions of sustainable job opportunities. This is the only way that the deprived segments can be included into mainstream economic activity of the country and their productivity optimised.
More resourceful initiatives and long-term solutions will help the government in addressing the economic problems permanently, rather than offering short-term solutions. The impact of a sustainable strategy will revolutionise industrial and academic foundations of the country. It will promise great benefits to the deprived farmer community, even if there are big political changes taking place in the national leadership.
Ammar Muzaffar
Published in The Express Tribune, March 10th, 2017.
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