| February 28, 2003 | Friday | Zul Hijjah 26, 1423 |
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Stranded and evicted
PTA’s misplaced zeal
THE consistent failure of the economy over the last three years to generate enough jobs for the unemployed seems at last to have started bothering the official economic managers. The other day while talking to this newspaper, Dr Ishrat Hussain, governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, expressed his serious concern in this regard and seemed at a loss to understand why, despite a significant increase in the flows of foreign capital, foreign direct investment and remittances in the last couple of years, new jobs in adequate numbers are not being created. He thought there was an urgent need, therefore, to invest more in agriculture, irrigation and public sector development projects. One only hopes that the budget makers would pay proper heed to his advice while making new budgetary allocations for the next financial year. It is equally important to increase allocations for infrastructure projects like construction of roads, bridges and ports, etc., which have the potential to generate jobs on a mass scale. This is exactly what those who had disagreed with the policy of keeping a tight lid on public sector development in order to achieve the IMF-prescribed macroeconomic stability had been suggesting all along.
Dr Ishrat Hussain has also talked of effective public and private sector partnership and increased investment by the private sector in small and medium enterprises. In doing so, however, the State Bank governor seems to have ignored the distinctiveness of the Pakistani private sector. It is a product of concessions and doles. It invests money only where it is assured of a huge margin of profit. Past experience shows that it comes out of its hibernation only when it is sufficiently assured of the right kind of environment by the government. So, instead of waiting for the private sector to become an engine of growth, a role which the latter has consistently shunned, the government should initiate economically viable, job-intensive public sector projects. This will help revive the economy which in turn will generate enough resources to keep the budgetary deficit within the IMF-prescribed limits. However, the policy of the last three years has neither yielded the desired results in terms of budgetary deficits, nor has it helped break the economic stagnation as the overall growth during the period remained a little over three per cent annually. Inevitably, poverty has become more widespread and the unemployment level higher, possibly around 10 per cent at present.
It is time to explain to the IMF that the programme of poverty alleviation (PRGF), as designed by the Fund on the basis of an unrealistic view of the role of the private sector here, is likely to add to the problem of poverty rather than reduce it. The Fund should also be persuaded to make enough adjustments in the design of the PRGF to give adequate elbow room for the public sector to serve, at least over the next three years, so that it continues to promote growth even if the domestic private sector continues to remain in its narrow shell. Meanwhile, official policy planners, in consultation with independent experts, should design a home-grown programme to improve entrepreneurial skills of the domestic private sector so that in due course of time these come into play to ensure better planning, management and productivity.
THERE seems to be no end to the prolonged misery of the stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh. As if things were not bad enough for them living in slums since 1971, and hoping against hope for repatriation to Pakistan, the Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) recently bulldozed some 300 of their thatched dwellings in the capital’s Mirpur locality. This has rendered over 3,000 of these stranded people homeless who have continued to call themselves Pakistanis since the creation of Bangladesh. Their expulsion from the land owned by Bangladesh’s housing and public works ministry took place in spite of Dhaka High Court’s stay order against ejection. Earlier, the DCC had demolished some 30 homes in the same locality in December, shutting down small-scale cottage industries that provided livelihood to a good number of the stranded families. The plight of these people is nothing short of a human tragedy that has now been visited upon the second and third generations of this unfortunate lot.
There is no denying the fact that bad politics and manipulation on the part of some self-styled community leaders have taken a devastating toll on these people’s lives. Dhaka had generously offered them citizenship within years of Bangladesh’s creation, which a good number of them accepted. Many others were kept away by their misguided leaders who have continued to exploit them for vested interest. Their repatriation to Pakistan has only remained a dream owing mainly to the implications of such a move for Sindh where, once repatriated, they are most likely to settle eventually. Meanwhile, the Pakistan High Commission in Dhaka is trying to reason with the Bangladesh authorities to resettle these uprooted people on humanitarian grounds. For now, this seems to be the only logical, if temporary, way out of the tragic plight of the affected families. It seems a permanent solution with regard to the fate and future of the stranded families, with adequate provisions for livelihoods in either Bangladesh or Pakistan, will have to be found with the help of international donors. This is because, given the financial costs involved, neither country can afford to undertake the task all on its own.
THE Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) seems to have its priorities quite wrong. Instead of asking Internet service providers to improve their service and increase download speeds, it has gone ahead and issued a directive banning over a hundred ‘pornographic’ websites. Notwithstanding the fact that implementing such a decision is most likely to be impossible from a technical point of view, it shows that the PTA wants to take on the role of public censor. The PTA has told Internet providers to block these sites since under their operating licence users were not supposed to have access to pornographic images. Unfortunately, such a law does not take into account the reality which is that there are over three billion websites on the Internet, with a sizable proportion of the sort the PTA would like to ban. Banning all of them would be next to impossible in even the most technologically advanced societies, and to think of doing that in Pakistan is simply absurd. And what is to prevent banned websites from re-emerging under different names and Internet addresses?
A spokesman for the national association of Internet providers says the PTA action will be counterproductive since download speeds will become even slower than they already are. However, the providers should remember that part of the blame for the Internet being so slow in Pakistan has to lie with them since they often acquire many more customers than their installed network can handle. The PTA should concentrate on ensuring that Internet providers improve the quality of the services that they provide and that download speeds are made faster. That is where the interests of net users lie.