November 2, 2003

When Pakistan set its eyes on being a nuclear power, it happened within15 years regardless of the number of governments that came to power during that time. The same can be done in other sectors, provided a National Industrial Vision is put in place and given the same level of support

THE golden era of science and philosophy in the Islamic world lasted during the period of seven centuries from 700AD to 1400AD. The luminaries whose contributions were to dramatically lay the foundations of subsequent historic developments in various scientific disciplines included, among others, Jabar-bin-Alhayan (chemistry), Al-Khawarzami (mathematics), Al-Razi (chemistry and medicine), Ibn-al-Haisam (optics), Al-Bairuni (physics and medicine), Ibne-Sina (medicine).

It was during this period that there were unprecedented intellectual activities directed at unravelling the mysteries of nature and these were characterized by the development of a critical and analytical approach which is inherent in modern science. These contributions led to the renaissance in Europe and laid the foundations of the modern era.

Unfortunately, this spirit of enquiry and analysis was to be replaced by dogma and ignorance, resulting in the erosion of the scientific spirit and accompanying political power in the Muslim world. Indeed, history has shown that advances in science and technology are necessary prerequisites for political and economic strength — a lesson that we have long forgotten, and ritual has alas largely replaced the true dynamism inherent in Islam.

The tremendous advances made in the field of science and technology in the last several decades have transformed our lives in a multitude of ways. This is evident in almost every facet of human endeavour. These advances have been driven by an ever-growing volume of exciting discoveries, largely emanating from the science laboratories in the West, and their transformation into new products or processes which have flooded world markets, thereby showering vast economic rewards on those nations that have had the courage and vision to make science and technology the cornerstone of their respective development programmes.

It is imperative that OIC member countries invest massively in education, particularly in basic and applied sciences, in order to shrug off their paralytic dependence on the West for meeting all their needs, such as industrial machinery, pharmaceuticals, defence equipment etc. This is only possible if we build world-class Centres of Excellence where new knowledge can be created and applied towards the development of new products and processes.

We must realize that our real wealth is not the natural resources that we may possess, but our children. Only through investing in them can we make genuine progress.

At the very outset it is worthwhile to dwell on what constitutes development. Some would simply assess development from the GDP of a country or the per capita income. However, these parameters do not reflect the distribution of money within a society. Other parameters need also to be looked at, such as literacy, levels of skills in the workforce, average life expectancy, infant mortality rates, sanitary facilities, availability of clean water, access to medical facilities and technological development, and so on.

Essentially, it is the quality of life of the common man that must improve if one is to have true development, and the Human Development Index (HDI) is therefore a better indicator of the status of development of a country than the GDP or the balance of payment levels.

Development is, therefore, a complex process and a number of factors must come together before real development can taken place. There is, however, international consensus that the key to development lies in the ability of a country to effectively tap into the creative talents of its people.

This can be achieved in three clear steps: one, the establishment of a high quality education system. In a country of the size of Pakistan with about 150 million people, there are surely tens of thousands of students in the ‘genius category’ with the potential of transforming this nation within a couple of decades. The challenge is to discover them, nurture them first at the school, college and university levels in Pakistan, and then, after giving them the best postgraduate training in the top universities of the world, offer them irresistible financial and institutional package to attract them back to Pakistan and work for the country.

Two, the country should invest in Basic and Applied sciences. Too often in developing countries, one comes across bureaucrats who question the wisdom of investing in Basic sciences as they consider this an unaffordable luxury. They are dreadfully wrong! Without strength in the four core Basic science disciplines — physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology — it is not possible to develop the Applied sciences in a sustainable manner. Basic and Applied sciences need to interact vigorously, each posing problems to the other to solve, and the importance of this synergy needs to be fully appreciated.

A country that invests only in such fields as information technology or biotechnology, as they appear to be attractive for economic progress, will soon find itself in difficulties since the face of science is changing at a breathtaking pace, driven by discoveries of fundamental importance in the basic sciences. Just as the last century was regarded as the century of micro-electronics and computer science, the current century will be known for the startling progress in biochemical sciences.

Health foods and nutraceuticals offer multi-billion-dollar opportunities, particularly in the developing world which can derive benefit from medicinal plants, specially due to the rich indigenous experience in the use of traditional medicine and the vast biodiversity that many developing countries have.

Another area of significance is new materials. The advent of composites and nano-science has opened up a multi-billion-dollar market that Pakistan needs to pursue with vigour through development of strong educational and R&D programmes. Nano-technology is developing rapidly, with the size of the already around $40 billion, but such technology-based development is passing the Islamic world by.

The third factor relates to the introduction of strong mechanisms to link the national R&D effort to industry, agriculture and defence. Expertise in science and technology alone is not sufficient unless the R&D effort is marketable. An example is that of the Soviet Union, which in spite of being very powerful in certain Basic and Applied sciences, collapsed economically as it could not market good automobiles, computers, household appliances etc. at the international level, and could not therefore reap economic rewards.

Hence, this ‘third factor’ is of critical importance and requires an ‘out-of-box’ innovative approach in order to launch a strong scheme of incentives in order to encourage entrepreneurship development and foster new start-up companies to fast emerge around emerging technologies.

It is important also to realize the new challenges which the implementation of WTO is going to pose for us. The process of globalization will unleash strong external market forces and only the fittest will survive. The ‘fittest’, at least for the next few decades, is going to be largely the industrialized West. Many companies in these countries have set up large production facilities in China, and the industry in Pakistan will suddenly face a massive influx of cheap imported goods.

Since the bulk of our industry is not prepared to meet such a challenge, we could suffer enormously and many industries will close down, thereby increasing the digital divide. The small and medium-scale industry will suffer the most, creating pressures of increasing unemployment.

Thus we see the emergence of a new global ‘economic warfare’ which has many dimensions — US versus Europe, US-Europe versus Japan, US-Europe-Japan versus China, and the advanced countries versus the rest of the world. The ‘rules of the game’ are already such as to allow only those countries to prosper which can invest massively in R&D and use this to make their products and processes internationally competitive. How does Pakistan prepare itself to meet these challenges?

It is important for our planners to understand in this context that the quality and quantum of human resources with the necessary technical and entrepreneurship skills have a critical role to play. We now live in a world where knowledge has become the key engine for socio-economic growth. Thus, development is no longer determined by oil, or minerals or other natural resources that a country may possess, but by the ability of a nation to tap into the creativity of its human resources.

This, in turn, requires the establishment of a high-quality school system, the presence of world-class universities and R&D institutions and measures to vigorously introduce the ‘third factor’ mentioned earlier — sustainable linkages of the R&D effort with the economy.

Pakistan has to come forward with a clear medium — and long-term national vision for development; where are we going to be by the year 2020 and 2030? What are our core competencies and how do we develop them? Are we going to be a manufacturer of automobiles or of ships? Are we to become a world leader in the production of chemicals and pharmaceuticals? Should we focus on becoming world class in chip designing?

Once there is a clear national vision and set direction, the the strategy and action plan must be prepared around building such a knowledge-driven economy. A political commitment with a clear set of direction at the higher level (such as ‘Pakistan will manufacture and export one million buses and trucks annually by 2020’) can set a chain reaction of mobilizing human and material resources, on the same pattern as was done for our nuclear programme.

The commitment that ‘Pakistan must become a nuclear power’ and a determined support by successive governments allowed this to happen within 15 years. The same can be done for any mega product of commercial importance. However, for this we need to urgently develop a vision and a strategy so that the population of 140 million that we possess can be transformed from a liability of teeming millions of uneducated and poverty-stricken masses to a huge asset comprising a highly educated and creative work force.

How this can be done? Simple! Education! This is why in his very eloquent address to the Labour Party in Brighton about two years ago, and again on September 30, 2003, at Bournemouth, British Premier Tony Blair forcefully stated that the three top priorities of his government were “Education, Education and Education” with a special emphasis on Higher Education.

It is this kind of thinking which has allowed certain nations to forge ahead. The digital divide is no more than a knowledge divide. The advanced Western countries are spending two to three per cent of their huge GDPs on R&D, while OIC member counties spend only about 0.2 per cent of their much smaller GDPs on it. As a result, the gulf between them continues to widen.

While there is little money available for strengthening science and technology, OIC member countries spend huge amounts on buying sophisticated arms from the West. In the case of the Arab OIC states, they spend only 0.2 per cent on average on R&D, but seven per cent on defence, which is resulting in massive transfer of funds to the West.

Besides, trillions of dollars of the Arab world are presently stacked up in Western bank accounts, funds now trapped because of the restrictions imposed by the US on the movement of funds from the US back to the Middle East. The situation in Asian and African OIC states is not much different.

There is a lesson to be learned from certain Asian countries, such as Singapore, Korea and Japan. Singapore launched a major programme to develop a strong knowledge-based economy about two decades ago. The highest priority for nation-building was given to Higher Education and as a result the annual budgets of its two universities together amount to $1.4 billion. In comparison, the total development budget of all our 46 public-sector universities is only $90 million!

The plight of the OIC states is highlighted by the fact that in spite of having some 70 per cent of the world’s energy reserves and a quarter of the globe’s other natural resources, the total GDP of all the 57 OIC member states taken together is a pitiful $1,200 billion. In comparison, the GDP of France alone is about $1,500 billion, that of Germany is about $2,500 billion, and that of Japan is about $5,000 billion!

The reason is simple: there are only about 550 universities in the entire Islamic world, mostly no better than low-level colleges, while there are over a thousand universities in Japan, and more than 120 universities in the city of Tokyo alone. Japan, mind you, has virtually no natural resources, and has thus put all its efforts in developing a very powerful work-force of highly trained and technologically competent professionals, and then using them to effectively manufacture high-tech goods.

The unfortunate gap in the Muslim world and the advanced countries is illustrated by comparing the ‘richest’ OIC member countries with even small European countries such as Austria and Belgium.

Austria, for instance, has a population of little over eight million, but has a GDP of over $210 billion! There is not a single OIC country that can challenge Austria’s GDP. Malaysia has a population of 22.2 million, but a GDP of only $89.7 billion; Indonesia has a population of 212.1 million, but a GDP of only $153.3 billion; Saudi Arabia has a population of 20.3 million — and of course vast oil reserves — but it has a GDP of only $173.3 billion. The highest GDP in the Islamic world is that of Turkey which is $185 billion.

Interestingly, Turkey’s higher GDP is a direct reflection of it being the most technologically advanced among the OIC member countries, which is not a coincidence! Planners and policy-makers in the Muslim world have to realize the direct relationship between technological advancement and the GDP of a nation. The name of the game, when it comes to development, is ‘high technology’. Unless we become a major player in this game, we will not be able to increase Pakistan’s present GDP of $67 billion to over $200 billion.

It will certainly not happen through increasing emphasis on low value-added agricultural produce such as wheat, cotton, sugarcane or rice. Even a 30 per cent increase in our present agricultural production will result in an increase of only about $4-5 billion in GDP terms, while our vision for 2020 must be to enhance our GDP to over $200 billion.

For this we will need to have a sustained growth in our GDP of 10-12 per cent annually, as is being done by China, so that we can double our GDP every 7-8 years. This level of growth can only be achieved if we re-adjust our development plans and focus them on the production of high-tech products.

While the linkage between economic progress and technological capabilities is well appreciated in the advanced world, it is alas not properly understood among OIC countries and is not a part of the planning process even in Pakistan. Our industry relies on turn-key projects with little indigenous production of machinery. Indeed, in the process of national planning, technology capacity building does not form the cornerstone of our development.

Given the opportunity, freedom and support, Pakistani scientists can achieve anything. The nuclear programme is the most spectacular example in this regard. The IT policy has provided us with an infrastructure which is now superior to India within just three years, although India had started to invest in this field two decades before Pakistan did (UNCTAD 2003 Report).

With our own PAKSAT-1 satellite now fully operational in space at 380 East, and some 400 towns, cities and villages connected up with fibre, we are well placed to start using IT as an engine for socio-economic development. Some 1,300 branches of Habib Bank are being connected using this infrastructure. All public and private-sector universities are being connected together under the Pakistan Educational Research Network (PERN), and major programmes have been initiated to reverse the brain-drain and attract our best talent back home.

A project has been initiated to increase the PhD output from 250 to 1,500 annually over the next five years. Pakistan has at long last taken some critically important steps towards development. It is time now to have the National Industrial Vision in place, and the rest of the national development programmes, including the major portion of the Public Sector Development Programme, should be directed to achieving the goals set by the Vision.

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