State of brick and mortar

Published February 25, 2016
The writer is a member of staff.
The writer is a member of staff.

SO what’s your racket these days? In case you haven’t noticed, some sort of a boom is under way in the country, and if you don’t have a place at the table, then you’re the sucker. Streets in my city are lined with new construction projects, tall buildings with cranes towering next to them, that speak of a boom in construction. Word has it money is flowing from Dubai real estate into Pakistan, and property prices are spiralling. The ads in the papers announce a new residential project every other week.

Meanwhile announcements roll out endlessly of a new Chinese project as part of the CPEC bouquet. A new road just inaugurated, a new power project just got financial close, a new industrial park just approved.

It’s all brick and mortar these days. The Musharraf growth boom was about excess liquidity spilling into property and stocks, but also greasing the wheels of industry. It was accompanied by changing patterns of consumption — never have I seen so many foreign franchises appear so suddenly into our midst as in those years.

But the Nawaz Sharif economy, or perhaps we should call it the Ishaq Dar economy, is far simpler. It’s driven almost entirely through government spending on large projects and an overvalued exchange rate.

The effect is a lot of dust and smoke, but the insides don’t look very nice. It almost appears as if there are no priorities for government beyond coal-fired power plants, roads and lots of photo ops with Chinese investors.


Small, scalable schemes are either viewed through the lens of patronage, or bulldozed aside.


Consider, for instance, the dismal state of public health or education. It’s not even about the resources any longer. Any country that is spending less than a percentage point of its GDP on its public health infrastructure is living on borrowed time, and no amount of mega projects is going to change that. Education continues to sink deeper into its own quagmire, with the troubling new phenomenon of faculty members getting picked up by counterterrorism departments, or graduates from reputable universities becoming involved in heinous acts after finding inspiration from two-bit ideologues. Clearly there is something wrong with a curriculum that leaves young minds vulnerable to the lure of militant ideologies.

Even in the more bread-and-butter industries that are getting a lot of attention these days, like power, the focus remains on 19th-century technologies like coal-fired power plants. Other countries, with Bangladesh being a good example, have run very successful programmes using microfinance to help spread solar technology to households that are not on the grid. Going by the figures of the programme director there, almost 2,000 homes in Bangladesh go solar every day. Think about that for a moment.

They’re aiming to bring electricity to every household in the country by 2021, and thus far 10pc of that goal has been reached with more than 3.5 million households already on solar.

The idea is to think small and scale up, not the other way round. Bangladesh’s solar revolution is driven by a small 250W panel capable of running a couple of bulbs and a cell phone charger. The revolution begins in the margins, places where the national grid never reached, and starts by powering the homes of people who have been burning kerosene oil to light their homes for generations. It is powered by subsidised financing provided through a state-run programme, with help from the World Bank.

This is the sort of thinking that is sorely needed in Pakistan, in all areas ranging from health and education to power and transport. Small, scalable projects that aim to provide a crucial service or product to those segments who could never have dreamed of it, and then scaling it up.

But there is no room for this sort of thinking in Pakistan. Small, scalable schemes are either viewed through the lens of patronage, or bulldozed aside to make way for high-visibility projects alone. A billion and a half dollars would be enough to run a scheme of this sort to help spread solar technology to the outermost reaches of our power grid, those people whom the grid will either never reach. If it does, the electricity supply will be so intermittent and expensive as to be of little use for them. That would be the size of one mega project today. But because its benefits will take time to become visible and ripple through the rest of the economy, and we are in a terrible rush to show immediate results, even if they’re not of the kind that the country really needs, such thinking never finds traction in our policy environment.

The result is an economy geared almost exclusively to serve the needs of the rich. Steadily every aspect of our economy is swivelling around to serve elite needs alone.

The electricity in our system is being steadily diverted to elite neighbourhoods, public-sector health and education institutions rot and decay while elite schools and plush hospitals multiply. Land is eaten up to provide the housing needs of elites, gobbling up large chunks of prime agricultural land, or areas dedicated for the building of water reservoirs to provide the long-term drinking water requirements of cities like Rawalpindi are turned into elite housing colonies. Clean water has already become a luxury for many people in this country, as has a steady intake of nutrition, while bottled water companies grow and fancy restaurants sprout like mushrooms.

There is a very sad quality to the nature of the economic activity one sees with the naked eye these days. The same cranes lifting their cargo of concrete and steel to towering buildings of shiny glass are the perfect metaphor for the steely indifference of our policy machinery to the needs of the people that it should be serving.

The writer is a member of staff.

khurram.husain@gmail.com

Twitter: @khurramhusain

Published in Dawn, February 25th, 2016

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