| October 23, 2002 | Wednesday | Sha’aban 16,1423 |
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Needlessly draconian
PTCL’s unfair ban
ONE would agree fully with the speakers at the Dr Akhter Hameed Khan development forum held in Karachi on Sunday. What clearly emerged from their presentations was that many of the projects being undertaken by the government with the help of foreign aid-giving agencies are not really in the interest of the people for whose benefit they are meant to be. One speaker even identified a few projects which he had studied in depth to prove this point. He emphatically stated that the procedure of planning and executing these projects militated against the welfare of the community. Moreover, they created conditions that worked to the advantage of foreign governments and business concerns, while increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
There are a number of aspects of this issue which call for attention. First is the role of the aid-giving agencies. It would be simplistic to assume that they come forward with an offer of a loan for purely altruistic reasons. There are no free lunches now, and the donor almost invariably has a hidden agenda which the loan taker should try to discover. Apart from the political motive of gaining control over a Third World country’s foreign and economic policies, the aid giver also seeks to promote the financial interests of its patrons. That would explain why most loans are so closely tied to specifics which are determined by the donors without taking into account the interests of the people to be affected. One speaker cited the case of the fish harbour in Karachi which was developed to promote deep-sea fishing for the trawlers of some foreign countries to the detriment of the local fishermen.
The second, more crucial, aspect is how our own governments are lured into taking loans which have pushed the country into a debt trap. The argument that the country needs more loans to repay the old ones does not hold true. Most project loans are tied to specific ventures which cumulatively add to the overall debt burden. The keenness of policy-makers to accept loans is quite strange. True, many of them have been educated in western universities and quite a few have worked for international financial agencies whose thinking they have obviously imbibed. Others might be tempted by the massive sums involved which provide plenty of scope for corruption and illegal cuts for the compradors.
Then how should a Third World country with its limited resources finance its development needs? It is here that we should find it relevant to draw upon the philosophy of the man for whom the memorial meeting in Karachi was organized. Dr Akhter Hameed Khan was a staunch advocate of self-reliance and strongly believed that people should depend on their own resources to uplift themselves by means of their own planning and participation and according to their own development priorities. He proved the feasibility of this approach in the Orangi Pilot Project where he mobilized the local population to transform their living conditions. It is time we adopted this approach as an integral part of planning, which would help reduce our need for foreign loans and the parasitism that it entails.
IN ITS bid to pursue the remnants of Al Qaeda and their local collaborators, the government may be going overboard. The Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997, which left little to be desired in its already draconian provisions, has been further amended, giving the police unbridled powers to arrest suspects and to detain them for as long as one year without being formally charged before a court of law. Everyone living in this country, or even having a working knowledge of the law enforcement mechanisms here, knows what that means: the law will be openly abused by a police force notorious for torture and corruption. It could also become a tool in the hands of the ruling politicians to settle scores with their adversaries.
The ordinance in its amended form does not stop at arresting and detaining a suspect. It goes on to give the police the powers to investigate — read harass and torture — the suspect’s spouse, children and siblings. The amended ordinance has been sent to the law division for its final approval before the president formally promulgates it. If signed into law in its present form, rights activists fear that the ordinance will make a mockery of citizens’ rights and democratic norms of civil society. It is indeed disquieting that the government should be making such drastic changes to the penal code at a time when a new parliament comprising elected representatives of the people is about to be sworn in. Coming on top of the snatch-and-interrogate powers already enjoyed by the security services, as witnessed only the other day in the apparent detention of a well-known Lahore surgeon, there is a growing feeling that we may be bending over backwards to establish our credentials as a partner in the US-led war on terror.
PTCL’s ban on block Internet telephony websites that allow users a chance to talk to people overseas free of cost or for a nominal charge is short-sighted and unreasonable. However, it is also not quite unexpected since the state-owned phone utility owes its rapid rise to robust financial standing and profitability to its legally-protected monopoly status, and this ban is just another example of the misuse of this monopoly status. And just like most government monopolies, instead of gearing up to compete with potential rivals, it has chosen the easy way out by having them banned. PTCL’s argument is that it loses revenue every year when people living in Pakistan use the Internet rather than a PTCL telephone line to talk to relatives or friends abroad. Based on this reasoning, the state telecom regulation body, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, allowed the PTCL to impose this ban.
However, a closer look at the revenue figures that the PTCL claims it loses every year on this account would suggest that such losses are a miniscule proportion of its total annual turnover of over a billion dollars. Then there are other important reasons why the government should remove this ban. The most obvious relates to the interests of consumers. In this whole tussle between the PTCL and the Internet service providers, the interests of consumers have been ignored. If the PTCL feels that its ban is justified, then consumers, too, are right in feeling aggrieved since they are being deprived of the benefit of making overseas calls at very cheap rates. The other argument relates to the unfortunate tendency among many of our state-owned corporations which, because of years of government protection and monopoly status in their spheres of operation, tend to become flabby and inefficient — traits that are reflected in the declining standards of their services. And when competition does arrive — in this case in the form of Internet websites offering consumers cheap international calls — instead of innovating and offering new and enhanced services, PTCL stamps it out by imposing a ban. The ministry of science and technology should have this restriction on Internet telephony websites and services removed immediately.