| December 2, 2002 | Monday | Ramazan 26,1423 |
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A robbery a day
Making polluters pay
THE generous debt rescheduling agreement signed between Pakistan and the Paris Club creditors in December 2001 has entered the final stages of its culmination, with Japan completing the necessary arrangements for the signing of a bilateral accord with Islamabad. This will provide relief in the repayment schedule of Tokyo’s five billion dollar loan. Under the terms of the Paris Club agreement, Pakistan was given one full year to enter into individual rescheduling agreements with all of its official donors whom Pakistan jointly owed a sum of $12.5 billion. About 50 per cent of these loans were due for repayment by 2007. But with the coming into effect of the rescheduling agreement by the end of December this year, Pakistan is expected to obtain a 40 per cent cut in the overall net value of the outstanding debt. Already the government is said to have reduced the most expensive debt by two billion dollars, bringing down the overall burden from $38 billion dollars to $36 billion and a reduction of five per cent in foreign liabilities.
The savings in rupee terms accruing from this development, which in fact dates back to the not-so-generous first rescheduling obtained in January 1999 and then a second one on similar lines in December 2000, were used by the State Bank of Pakistan to purchase about four billion dollars from the open as well as interbank markets until about June 2001. Since September 2001, inflows of foreign exchange from other sources such as post-9/11 grants and official capital flows plus a marked jump in remittances have added another five billion dollars to the coffers of the SBP and the commercial banks, bringing the overall total foreign exchange reserves to a record nine billion dollars. This has had a salutary impact on the exchange rate, pushing up the value of the rupee against the dollar. Meanwhile, by retiring treasury bills worth $193 billion, the government is said to have reduced the outstanding domestic debt by eight per cent. Besides, as a result of low inflation and interest rates and a favourable exchange rate, the annual average growth in debt servicing is said to have been reduced to around three per cent over the last three years, compared to around 20 per cent during the 1990s.
All these are positive developments. And for once, a new government in Pakistan seems to be inheriting an economy which looks as if it has come out of the troubled waters. But there is still a lot of work to be done to bring it to a take-off stage. Gaps in social and physical infrastructure have widened massively in the last three years. Unemployment is at a record high. Poverty has deepened and widened. Production in all sectors is down. Investment, both local and foreign, is almost nil. Foreign trade and revenue collection are wobbly. The population growth rate is still at an unacceptable level. Illiteracy is still very high.
So, it is not going to be all milk and honey for the new government. It will be confronted with hard and difficult choices very soon. Have the reduction in the debt burden and record foreign exchange reserves created enough fiscal room to urgently take in hand economic revival projects? If so, what kind of projects will sustain what has been achieved so far and at the same time alleviate the sufferings of the poorest of the poor? If room is still not considered adequate for taking such steps, then what will be the limits of hardship which the underprivileged will have to endure without losing patience and for how long? And can’t the government at least ensure that no section suffers more than the other? The answers to these questions will make all the difference between a better tomorrow and more of the same that the people of this country have suffered over the last half a century and more.
THE frequency and boldness with which robbers have been operating in different sectors of Islamabad during the past week is disturbing. There has been practically one major robbery a day in the past week, and in at least four instances the robbers, numbering four to five in each incident, boldly entered homes at gunpoint in the presence of the family. They made off with cash, jewellery and electronic items totalling millions of rupees.
It is ironic that such armed robberies should be on the increase in the capital, where on November 4, the interior minister had launched the first arms licences computerization pilot project aimed at storing complete data on arms licences and thus providing a check on illegal weapons. It looks like the residents of Islamabad will not see the fruits of this project for a long time yet. Something also needs to be said about the way robbers manage to get away with relatively soft sentences. On November 18, a judicial magistrate in Islamabad awarded three robbers a mere eight months rigorous imprisonment and a paltry fine of Rs 100 each for a robbery which they had committed last year. Earlier, another robber was awarded six years rigorous imprisonment and fined Rs 1,000 by a court in Rawalpindi. Such nominal convictions hardly constitute a deterrence or make any sense of the motto “crime does not pay”.
Crime prevention is also an angle that the police need to work harder at. In this, the police should solicit the help of the residents themselves, since many of these robberies take place when unwary occupants of the house answer the doorbell without taking any safety precautions. A campaign to make residents more wary and to encourage them to instal better locks and stronger doors in their homes could help.
THE country badly needs environmental tribunals so that citizens can at least have some place to go to and file complaints against rising pollution. The record of governments so far has been quite dismal. According to the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act of 1997, all provinces should by now have had tribunals in place to settle cases and disputes arising out of industrial and other kinds of pollution. These courts are crucial because they make it possible for the citizens and communities affected by air, water or noise pollution to seek legal redress. To that extent, their establishment will correct some of the bias that exists in the country today in favour of industrial and corporate polluters and empower ordinary citizens by giving them the right to take legal action against those who destroy their living environment.
Punjab is the only province to have set up an environmental tribunal, but that too ceased to exist after the order notifying its creation lapsed. Sindh, which is in dire need of tough anti-pollution measures, has yet to get such a tribunal. Hopefully, the new government at the centre will now attend to this matter with the urgency that it demands and establish environmental tribunals all over the country. This will not only redress popular grievances, but also send a strong message to industrial and other polluters, many of whom are powerful government organizations, to take measures to reduce the damage that their activities cause to air, water and the environment generally.