ISLAMABAD, Nov 15: Deputy Chairman Planning Commission, M Akram Shaikh on Tuesday said the policy makers had failed to eradicate feudal system, poverty, illiteracy and socio-economic injustices. He was speaking at the inaugural ceremony of a three-day workshop on Pakistan Poverty and the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Monitoring, which was organized by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) for Pakistani parliamentarians in collaboration with the World Bank Institute of Development Economics.

Mr Shaikh said that some of the high-ups of Pakistani society including the policy-makers might receive respect while visiting the foreign countries. However, the case was totally different when it came to ordinary Pakistani citizens, who were more willing not to hide their passports while staying abroad.

He said Pakistan needed a sustainable society and not sustainable development.

“There is no need of redistributing poverty, but creating wealth and distributing it equitably”, Mr Shaikh said.

He said there was a dire need of character building of all the Pakistanis and human resource development and value addition in every field.

He said more and more money should be channelled into the education sector to produce skilled people. He asked how could Pakistan make progress where feudal still occupied the parliament and kept gunmen while travelling in Islamabad.

Speaking about the inability of Pakistani education to produce people as per the demands of the job market, he said: “It is hard to find a skilled electrician or plumber in the whole of Karachi.”

He said Pakistan’s total annual export was less than $10 billion and was largely dependent on cotton, which contributed to 65 per cent of the country’s total export.

“We produce second rate cotton products. A Pakistani T-shirt only sells at $2 compared to that of Korean for which people are willing to pay $10 and the French ones which sell at $30 each,” Mr Shaikh said.

He also criticised the quality of Pakistani leather goods, the second largest industry in terms of export, and the rice.