THE 10th general council of the OIC standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (Comstech) gave an encouraging response to President Pervez Musharraf’s plea for advancement of science and technology in the Muslim world.

The committee approved the president’s proposal of setting up of a multi-billion-dollar Pan-Islamic Fund for science and technology development and of sending Pakistan Science and Technology Minister Dr Ata-ur-Rahman as special emissary to selected heads of state and government to seek their participation in the proposed fund.

The president’s suggestion for the setting up of a multi-billion-dollar research and development fund is a way forward. However, much more than funds will be needed to move ahead on this front. It will require great political will, a radical rethinking of priorities and a drastic change in the collective mindset to take the Muslim world out of its current technological and scientific backwardness. Sadly, past experience suggests that any plans for a radical change of orientation will be shelved until the next time such a meeting takes place.

Muslim scholars and scientists at similar forums have bemoaned the poor state of learning with depressing regularity but nothing concrete has emerged from this sort of breast-beating. There is growing cynicism about the effectiveness of many of the forums where leaders from Muslim countries congregate to debate and discuss their common problems.

The combined GDP of the Muslim world was $1,200 billion while Japan alone had a GDP of $5,500 billion, Germany $1,000 billion and even tiny Austria’s GDP stood at over $200 billion. Japan alone had 1,000 universities, all Muslim countries put together had only 430. Similarly, while the Muslim countries produced only 500 science PhDs annually, Britain alone awarded 3,000 such doctorates every year.

President Musharraf rightly pleaded that the Muslim world must pool its resources, both financial and intellectual, and encourage scientific and technological research to promote economic development.

The meeting also adopted recommendations of the international seminar on digital divide, which was held earlier in Islamabad. It had proposed setting up IT-OIC monitor groups to follow up, monitor and advise OIC member-countries on ICT policies.

Endowed with enormous resources and driven by ideas of catching up with the advanced world, Muslim countries lack in initiative and proper sense of direction.

The lead will now appear to have been convincingly provided by Pakistan, especially from the rapid strides made in development and application of science and technology in the last couple of years.

Pakistan’s pioneering move in harnessing science and technology for setting the country on the way to progress has also fired the imagination of other Muslim countries too. One can look forward to a collective effort in this direction all over the Islamic world, changing the distorted world outlook on Muslims and Islam.

In its first session the Comstech council took a number of vital decisions. It approved 27 programmes for the next two years, together with sanction of a $7 million budget for their implementation.

In the perspective of extreme backwardness of Muslim counties in science and technology and the urgency of catching up with advanced world, it may appear less. Nevertheless, compared with the ground so far covered in bridging the yawning gap since the inception of Comstech in 1980, it is a breakthrough.

Pakistan has confirmed its lead role in promotion of science and technology with its pledge of $1,000,000 — it topped the list of the seven contributors, followed by Oman ($200,000), Iran ($110,000), Saudi Arabia and Sudan ($100,000 each), Nigeria ($25,000), and Syria ($20,000). But this is only the start.

Pakistan has increased in current financial year’s budget allocation to Rs 6 billion from the previous year’s Rs 120 million for science and technology.

The government’s agenda of economic revival, with due reliance on science and technology, has witnessed an unprecedented upsurge of enthusiasm in the scientific domain, with a marked emphasis on information technology.

A World Bank team late last year had consented to provide substantial support to science and technology projects in Pakistan.

For adopting this dynamic approach, a beginning was made in a systematic way by first building a viable and strong base for research and development, focusing first the pursuit of science and technology as disciplines of education.

For lack of linkages between education and development, the economic uplift task was dotted with too many distortions. While embarking upon plans to rehabilitate science and technology, the government did well to set the ball rolling in the right directions.

In fact, the key role in industrial development in the advanced countries has invariably belonged to research and development.

Almost three decades ago, Algerian leader Houari Boumedienne presented a radical vision for the future at the 1974 Islamic summit in Lahore.

In that memorable address he had outlined key areas of collective existence where research, studies, coordination and pooling of talent and resources by the Muslim countries could open up enormous possibilities of progress and advancement.

This and other similar plans continue to gather dust, even as large parts of the Muslim world sink deeper into poverty and backwardness.

The Muslim world must go beyond describing, over and over again, the symptoms of the malaise afflicting it and take urgent steps to find a cure. The alternative is to be left way behind in the global race for technological and scientific advance.

IT is expected of every government to ensure to the maximum extent possible that potentially hazardous substandard foods and harmful drugs are not made available on the shelves. Unfortunately, consumers here have found they cannot depend on the authorities to protect them on this score.

This is because there is an almost total absence of quality control in the production of food items and in the manufacture of medicines. This absence of quality control, plus poverty and an inadequate public healthcare system, is responsible for the country’s poor health indicators, including low life expectancy and high infant/under-five mortality rates, which are among the lowest and highest, respectively, in Asia.

It is the non-governmental consumer associations which have been in the forefront in the campaign against substandard foods and harmful drugs being sold in the market, and not the state’s Pakistan Standard Quality Control Authority (PSQCA) or the Drug Registration Board of Pakistan or the health authorities in general. Even so, the authorities have been generally slow to react to any alert by these consumer associations to a substandard item or harmful drug, even after the issue comes to the notice of the press.

Last year the attention was on bottled water. Over 50 per cent of the brands available in Islamabad and Rawalpindi were found to contain microbiological and chemical contaminants and thus were unfit for human consumption. But nothing much seems to have been done to rectify the situation for, according to a survey as of Dec 31, 2001, not a single bottled water manufacturer has even registered its product with the PSQCA, the official body that is supposed to monitor the quality of food products and with which all food manufacturers are legally required to be registered.

Recently, an even more startling revelation has come to light: four out of every five brands of cooking oil has been found not conforming to the quality standards laid down by the PSQCA. Of the 122 cooking oil brands available in the market, a consumer association has found that only 25 actually conformed to the standard set by the PSQCA. A major cause of this state of affairs is obviously official inertia and inefficiency, and thus lax enforcement of the formulated standards of quality and packaging as laid down by the PSQCA.

But what is more worrying is the fact that substandard raw materials for manufacturing cooking oil have even been allowed to be imported into the country. Over a million tons of palm oil, mostly from Malaysia, is imported every year by ghee manufacturers since the country is no longer self-sufficient in the production of oilseeds. According to one report by a consumers’ association, in October 1999 a consignment of 6,000 tons of palm stearin imported by six edible oil-manufacturing companies was found by laboratory reports to be unfit for human consumption, but was declared as palm oil anyway. The consignment was released after the importers paid a 100 per cent fine to the Central Board of Revenue. Earlier on, the CBR had allowed the release of a consignment of palm oil that was contaminated with furnace oil.

The standard of edible oils should have been particularly scrutinized given the fact that it is consumed in large quantities in the country, it being an essential component of a large number of dishes and bakery products. In fact, according to one estimate, the average per capita consumption of palm oil in Pakistan is the highest in South Asia, about 16 kg per year. That the quality of this important ingredient of daily cooking is being compromised at the cost and jeopardy of the health of the people is, therefore, a matter that warrants serious attention and action by the authorities.

Of equal, if not greater, concern is the quality of drugs being produced by the tens of national and multinational companies and sold by over 11,000 pharmacies here. The market is flooded with fake, counterfeit and out-of-date medicines, particularly at drug stores located in rural areas and amid low- income urban populations, simply because there is no strict check or penalty levied on pharmacies found to be selling spurious or out-of-date drugs. Often even the date of expiry,, batch number and the manufacturing company’s address are not printed on the labels.

The Drug Registration Board of Pakistan should have checked the manufacture of such drugs in the first place. But this is not done as many drugs are being registered without thorough scrutiny. For instance, a number of raw materials intended for use in the manufacture of medicines for veterinary only are being used in the manufacture of medicines for human consumption. Reports suggest that almost 1,000 people die every day in this country because of spurious drugs. Surely this is reason enough for the authorities to sit up and take notice.

Another dangerous phenomenon is the easy availability of drugs that are banned elsewhere in the world. The latest example brought to public attention in the capital last week by a consumer association is the drug fenoverine, used in the treatment of gastro-intestinal problems. The drug was banned in France in 1997 and also withdrawn in Italy in the same year after life-threatening side-effects were reported. Yet, it is being produced and sold over the counter in this country.

The interesting thing is that the production and sale of fenoverine is illegal under the 1997 Pakistan National Drug Policy, according to which any drug withdrawn from the US, China, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Belgium would also face the same regulatory action here. But the problem once again is lax implementation and enforcement.

The government reacted promptly after the news broke about the majority of cooking oil brands being substandard in quality and announced that it would crack down on the manufacturers of low quality cooking oils by forming a special committee to take necessary action. However, it is quite another thing to see the government actually carrying out the crackdown and enforcing the set standards on cooking oils, or for that matter on many other foods products, as well as on medicines.

Organizations like the PSQCA and the Drug Registration Board of Pakistan need to be pulled into shape with the injection of qualified staff and adequate funding. This together with close cooperation with the provincial food and health departments and the various consumer associations can help these two important quality control organizations to develop into efficient watchdogs against substandard foodstuffs and spurious medicines.

New rules and regulations will also need to be formulated, enacted and enforced to develop a countrywide regulatory system whereby those who seek profits by playing with the health and lives of the people will not be spared. This should include new laws that strengthen the legal framework, at the moment extremely deficient and discouraging, to facilitate efficient redress of consumers’ complaints.

THE pursuit of arts has been a profitable activity for only the lucky few. Even in the West where the stars of the tribe seem to be doing rather well, probably better than plumbers, masons and carpenters, the ratio of writers, poets, sculptors, painters and musicians living on their creative product is small to that of those earning their bread and butter from some other whole time professions like beggary and banditry. Yet people continue to paint, write and sing. The creative urge is a compulsive passion and lies outside the laws of demand and supply. Were that not so we would not have such abundance of poetry in our little literate society. For our consumption Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz may have been more than enough to make us self-sufficient in this basically non-essential item of mental luxury.

Compared to prose, poetry is flowing in a massive deluge. Our culture’s preponderant talent for versification springs as much from our Third World little-else-to-do-ness as probably from our muddle-mindedness which soaks the vast empty spaces where intellect should have been with emotional and sentimental content. The excess of passion drives the untamed romantic to acts of savagery, the supine and subdued to writing verses with his own blood, keh khoone dil mein dubo li hein ungliyan mein ne. Prose on the other hand can be written with plain ink if there are things to say and a point has to be made. Unlike poetry nonsensical prose becomes immediately unreadable as we saw in the case of symbolic short fiction which caught on for a while but has mercifully faded into oblivion and died a natural death. Though in its short wake it helped lose fiction much of its ardent readership.

Of late though prose of the political kind has also had a field day. Retired generals and obsolete politicians have been unwinding the coils of their repolished memories and reformed thought. Travel writers have added their accounts of foreign lands to our slim body of nonfiction. But far easier it has been for newspaper columnists than others to become authors of books. Newspaper columns are supposed to be trashed with the news of the day. For this reason newsprint is manufactured, as the most perishable of paper and whatever is printed on its surface has to be equally biodegradable. But writers have this common frailty that they consider the pourings of their pens to be manuals of know-how for posterity. Yet it is better to have books than not to have them at all. Then saving newspaper articles at your own expense is the kind of service that is doubly desirable. Article writers no matter how good are neither here nor there. Holding a well bound volume in your hand that is also your own gives you a sense of importance your name on the broadsheet cannot match. Additionally it is going to serve as a chronicle of the time and add meat to the lean body of history that tends to record only the rise and fall of governments. And oh for the posthumous joy of being quoted by a future scribe!

Brig Hamid Saeed Akhtar’s collected newspaper articles make a shapely book titled Riyasat, Siyasat aur Qiyadat. It is an important collection as it can be taken to represent the refined and reasoned views of the establishment proper and what is of late has been loosely and tentatively but increasingly defined as the ‘Pakistani thinking’. The two are not different as differing with them lands one in a different category. But what is more important than his views is his chaste statement. This is solid prose, pointed and clear, unmuddled, as a soldier’s ought to be. The brigadier (whom I would hate calling retired, a rather uncivil appendage to a well earned rank that no other professional is constrained to use and when it is obvious he has no intention of raising a brigade of his own or leading another’s. It sounds like marhoom, the late Mr So and So) himself ascribes that to his sincerity of feeling and the conviction and strong belief that he is on the right course. Yet it is charming the way he puts it across without sounding dogmatic. Instead you find him arguing and presenting facts. He possesses an open mind. It appears he would agree with you if you were able to convince him. Mr Aitezaz Ahsan in his foreword has complained against his denunciation of politicians and the civil bureaucracy but unfortunately few can disagree with what the