Leapfrogging into the future

On many counts, Pakistan is still a laggard. Human resource indices are among the lowest; water availability per capita now places it among water-scarce nations; yield per acre, compared to India, pales despite similar land and climatic conditions and a common agricultural tradition. Industry continues to exit, and the job market is sluggish. Growth rates are Nehruvian – three per cent – while population grows at 2.6 per cent annually. Net growth remains abysmal or negative. Pakistan is burdened with an increasing debt pile and is forced to compromise on its sovereignty; in many cases in its foreign policy and in steering the economy. Straitjacketed, it is impossible to plan Pakistan's political or socioeconomic future.

With so much wrong and little space to remedy the fault lines, a scary future beckons a state looking at a bloated midriff – sixty-five per cent of the population is under twenty-five, of whom twenty-five million school-going children do not attend school. With the population envisaged to touch 400 million by 2050, the number of working-age people entering the job market may climb to around 4 million per year. It is expected that with the economy at hand, only 1.5 million of those hopefuls will find jobs. Uneducated, or partly educated, without skills, this bulging midriff will only explode into unknown proportions.

It is not that these facts are new to policy circles, but it is the inaction to break out of the logjam that pulls the nation into further mire. Perhaps the odds are so heavily stacked that a recovery may seem improbable. Hence, business as usual and a one-day-at-a-time approach of those in power. In the meantime, society, state, and the economy continue to unravel around us. Borrowed money remains only borrowed with heavy and limiting conditions on its use, if at all. The avenues of growth dwindle fast with every passing day while barely keeping afloat counts as success. A nuclear Pakistan seems incongruent with the absence of a capable institutional and human workforce compatible with the modern economy.

The economy lies at the heart of this disconnect and the broader socioeconomic decline. Conventional efforts to escape this trap tend to rely on incremental, traditional remedies: preserving the economy's core sectors – agriculture, industry, and services – while directing resources through policy tweaks alone towards targeted sub-sectors. Although this approach is broadly valid, the real challenge is to secure those resources and create policies, institutions, and a workforce capable of substantially improving and sustaining productivity. Only then can the economy generate the growth and revenues needed to invest in socioeconomic development. Again, can Pakistan await incremental catching up when the world around is galloping ahead? We barely subsist at the frontier-to-emerging levels in the economy.

It seems to me, and I have propagated this at length in most interactions that we, as a nation, need to identify a few nodes that, if triggered, can propel us fast enough to reach the next tier in economic progress. As the world knocks at the latest technological breakthroughs of the modern era, like Artificial Intelligence, we remain only poor imitators of the rhetoric, without, of course, the know-how, the means, or the expertise to ever reach the level of research and development in most modern economies. At best, we are consumers of what gets counted as AI in commercial applications. The world at large is also struggling to integrate and quantify how AI would become a tool in and of the modern economy. We only hear of those advances. The gap is too wide to be ever bridged without resources and without a capable workforce at that level of knowledge and expertise.

This cycle needs to be broken through educating, skilling and exercising the emerging cadres in the workforce to become relevant as the new economy takes shape. With our size of population, and the education gap, as indeed its quality, even this shall be monumental. But move along those lines we must, to remain relevant, or the march of time will crush us under.

Digitisation of our entire functioning as an economy and as a society can be that next frontier which, when breached, can open newer horizons for us. It must begin by simultaneously laying down the physical infrastructure for the digitisation of our everyday functions through a countrywide network of optical fibre cabling and nodal placement, which will help transmit, receive and preserve data at high-speed traffic. A workforce not necessarily at the level of breakthrough research but merely informed, educated and skilled enough to use the systems in tasks that together can provide the basis of services and applications will itself generate that ecosystem of innovation and product development which can be relevant to plug into the global architecture.

Our infrastructure orientation must change from mere brick-and-mortar roads and buildings infrastructure to a data-driven infrastructure which will help multiply productivity. As we move businesses and goods at optimal speed across the country and connect to the global digital market, this will have a supplementary beneficial effect. This will manifest in training the bulging 'midriff' in a productive activity, and in automating tracking and integration of the economic activity into the nation-wide, data-driven market mechanism. Supply chains can be better monitored, and revenue can be correctly estimated. Policies and rules of doing business must change to enable freedom of investment and return on such ventures.

We need to reconnect with China, which remains the world leader in developing and implementing a digital ecosystem encompassing the full gamut of national and social activities. From safety to security to productivity, all facets will invariably be drawn into this architecture, remedying our most disconcerting social and economic faultlines that human agency alone has been unable to repair. China can help us develop both physical and intellectual architecture to speed up our engagement with what will surely define the new world and the new economy. It will willy-nilly push other components of the economy too to plug in and upgrade their respective processes.

Data is the new frontier. We will need to build it and preserve it. Energy and data will drive the new economy. Our future development should not only be another motorway, industrial estate or a subsidy; it is the architecture of energy, connectivity, data and skills, which will catapult us into the future. Incrementalism has little scope in modern times.