ISLAMABAD, Aug 27: A political revolution, and not foreign- fed privatization and structural adjustment programmes, can rid Pakistan of its elitist economy and introduce an equity-based economy.

This was the near-unanimous call from social activists who participated in a day-long public forum organized by the Society for Alternative Media and Research and ActionAid here on Saturday on “The State of Pakistan’s Economy: The Real Picture”.

Pakistan should stop borrowing from the World Bank and the like because the policies they dictate were robbing it of its economic sovereignty and producing more and more poor in the country, they said.

Loans from the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on the one hand influence the policies of Pakistan negatively and on the other add to poverty instead of relieving it.

While criticising the role of IMF and WB one participant said the Cuban revolutionist, Fidel Castro, was right in stating in one of his addresses at the UN that IMF and WB would never reduce poverty but would rather increase it and that he (Castro) was willing to be hanged from the building of the UN headquarters if his claim was proven wrong in future.

Countries which did not accept the assistance of these international financial institutions had managed to break the chains of poverty and attain self-sufficiency in many areas, the speaker said.

Dr Kaiser Bengali, a teacher at the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST), said “the hold of the military on the economy” must be broken and at least 10 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) must be spent on physical and social infrastructure, which had a next-to-nothing share in the budget.

He said the rising rate of inflation could be brought down if the government reduced taxes on food items and other commodities of public use and cut non-developmental expenditures.

Government’s spending was promoting a non-productive economy and that was why the benefits of growth never trickle down to the grass-roots level, he added.

Dr Bengali said the federal ministries dealing with the concurrent list should be shut down and their tasks handed over to provinces. Over-lapping institutions, for example the Army Coast Guards and Maritime Security Agency, should be done away with.

Pakistan, he said, was such a resource-rich country that it could not only solve its major problems in the short span of 20 years but can even help in eliminating poverty from India and Bangladesh.

However, the elites of the country were neither interested in change nor let the poor devise a way out of their miseries. What the elites were doing was the ‘opting process’ — choosing one of the many options of good living open to them, he said.

They were not bothered about reforming the school and hospital systems because they can send their children abroad for education and can afford treatment at hospitals of any developed country.

“Their only concern is how to reach the airport in a crisis and fly out to the foreign country whose nationality they possess,” he said.

Mazhar Arif of the Society for Alternative Media and Research contrasted the government’s claims of “historic economic growth” with the dismal state of affairs of the poor in the country.

Several other speakers also sought to expose “the myth of high economic growth created by fudging figures”.

Some participants were critical of what they called “the poor role played by the state-controlled media” in creating awareness among the masses and giving them a direction for a better future.

They said the print media was doing a little bit but the circulation of newspapers was very limited in a population of more than 150 million.

The newly launched private channels too failed to highlight the real issues and cater to special interests because profits come first for them and the government and the corporate sector are the big advertisers.