Pakistan should equip workforce for CPEC challenges

Business houses need to win supply contracts for construction material, offer technical assistance

ISLAMABAD: Is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) really a fate changer? Yes, if everything goes according to the plan. But what is the plan? And how it is implemented?

These two questions are important as doubts of smaller provinces about the real CPEC road map have started subsiding.



Reservations of these provinces may not be well-founded. Their leaders might be indulging in acrimonious politics. But what actually is in this project that may help to change the economic game in Pakistan and the entire region and how it is going to be realised?

These are the issues that need to be technically raised. However, the Panama Papers leaks case against the prime minister and his family could prevent an insight into the two issues.

A lot depends on the success or failure of CPEC. If it fails, Pakistan won’t be able to have a chance to reap even half of the benefits of CPEC. If it succeeds, the country might not only be economically strong but it will also be able to get rid of many monstrous forces it has had to endure over the past seven decades.

In order to succeed, a complete rebirth of the political, cultural, economic and intellectual Pakistan is needed.

This entails a change in the social and structural course, which starts not in factories and workshops, but in the quarters holding actual power. It needs a change in the constitution, laws, procedures, money-related behaviour of the entire state, business houses, the big agricultural class and the mainstream demography.

Consultants in Karachi and Islamabad who have experience of assisting in mega projects indicate that China might accomplish as much as it aspires if only 10% of the existing Pakistani political, cultural, economic and intellectual energy is refocused on the CPEC project.

But, they say, Pakistan cannot accomplish even 20% of what is due from CPEC if it does not multiply its political, cultural, economic and intellectual energy between 2017 and 2020.

What does Pakistan need to multiply this energy in these four years? Pakistan needs to equip its labour and their supervisors with the latest techniques of construction from mapping to carpeting of roads.

Once the roads, spread over 3,000 km under CPEC, are built, the next phase will be to develop the water and power infrastructure along these roads. Time is of prime essence. Has Pakistan started equipping its workforce for the purpose?



Business houses in Pakistan need to enter into joint ventures with Chinese and other foreign entrepreneurs not after the roads are constructed, but long before that. Businesses compete for opportunities to succeed ahead of the opportunity becomes too obvious.

In this competition, they need to win supply contracts for the construction material and the technical assistance they can offer for the initiation of work on CPEC projects.

Have the Board of Investment (BoI), Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), ministries of commerce and industries, Planning Commission and Ministry of Finance begun coordinated efforts for the purpose?

An Islamabad-based business development consultant pointed out the other day that expert sessions on CPEC, conducted by private sector institutions so far, focused only on the macro issues and missed the micro matters, which were more important as far as CPEC success for Pakistan is concerned.

In the end, the most important question is: Has the government initiated a training course for technical orientation of CPEC-related ministries and the private sector on the micro issues?

Not yet. When does it plan to initiate it? No one knows. Officials of the BoI, FBR, ministries of commerce and industries, Planning Commission and Ministry of Finance are completely dumb about the challenges posed by the micro issues relating to the CPEC time frame. These are, let me say, signs of a planning failure, not of success.

The writer has worked with major newspapers and specialises in the analysis of public finance and geo-economics of terrorism

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd, 2017.

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