25 September 2004	Saturday	09 Shaban 1425

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ISLAMABAD, Sept 24: The government's chief economist affirms that Pakistan has the capacity to achieve UN Millennium Development goals. "They are doable," Chief Economist Pervez Tahir said in a lecture at the Pakistan Social Sciences Forum here on Friday.

President of the forum, Dr Inayetullah, was in the chair and monitored the discussion session attended by a large number of economists, government officials from economics and planning departments and representatives from the social society organizations.

When Dr Inayetullah asked if Pakistan would be able to achieve the UN Millennium development goals, Mr Tahir said these were mutually agreed targets and the government policies had been fashioned in a way to achieve them.

Mr Tahir said these targets would be reviewed at the summit which would be held in 2005. The summit is a meeting place for heads of states, and in the glittering aura it would be difficult for any head of the government to shrink from the efforts aimed at reducing poverty.

Pakistan might be at a disadvantage but it is first in the list of Muslim countries to achieve some of the goals including achieving openness in democracy and politics.

Dr Tahir presented a chart of Millennium development goals and targets. Eradication of extreme poverty among people who earn less than a dollar a day as well those who suffer from extreme hunger should be halved between 1990 and 2015 as per target. Among other goals and targets were to ensure that by 2015, children everywhere would be enabled to complete a full course of primary schooling.

The UN Millennium goals also call for integrating the principles of sustainable development in the country's policies and programmes applied with full effort to preserve environment resources, to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water as well as to bring significant improvement in the lives of 100 million slum dwellers.

In addition, the goals call for further development of an open, rural based, non-discriminatory trading and financial system, and to deal with the debt problems of developing countries with generous national measures.

When asked how would Pakistan achieve these targets, the chief economist said the government was busy writing some kind of development plan spread over five years (2005-2010).

"They may not be overtly stated as the next five year plan but the aim of the plan, which is still on the drawing board, would be similar to development plans. At one point Pervez Tahir said it was difficult to end injustice. Certainly, there was no serious thinking on the part of developed countries to end injustice.

Development strategies were designed over the last 50 years as a fashion and this should be of some concern for the social scientists who should be 'looking at issues behind the issues' to reason why this should be the case, he said.