PTDC: closures and layoffs

It would appear that the government’s tourism promotion strategy is about to get more and more reliant on camping, after the decision to close 36 Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation motels and cut 450 jobs. Zulfi Bukhari, the chief of the National Tourism Coordination Board and the PM’s Adviser on Overseas Pakistanis, used the language of a management consultant to justify the move. “The changes are restructuring in accordance with global best practices,” he said.

How exactly the government hopes to promote tourism by reducing the number of places that people can stay in is confounding. Then there is the government notification of the closures and layoffs. Blaming the Covid-19 pandemic for the closures is a tasteless joke. The government should be the last institution to be firing people for losses due to an ‘act of God’, which in reality is its own terrible management of the pandemic. Also, given that the government offered only a nominal sum for individuals affected by the pandemic, which has also reduced job availability elsewhere, the government has fired these employees with little short-term income or employment options. We are also hearing that the employees were not even given their past dues, although the notification did say that these would be released via the local managers.

This kind of wide-scale overnight firing is unheard of in government jobs. Job security is one of the reasons that people work for the state. Reforms are attempted before a drastic measure such as mass layoffs is pursued. But maybe that is not the case in Naya Pakistan. We know that the PTDC had continuing problems under previous regimes, as Bukhari rightly pointed out. However, we also know that despite lacking many facilities, these motels were still among the best places to stay on a budget in the northern areas and elsewhere. In this context, closing them makes no sense, unless the government is making way for private parties running lower grade and more pricey facilities. That accusation was thrown at the past governments when they tried closing motels. Is Bukhari admitting that the people he says had “ruined the corporation” actually had the right idea?

Published in The Express Tribune, July 6^th, 2020.

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