KARACHI: “The government needs to consolidate infrastructure to consolidate expenditure,” said senior economist and academic Dr Kaiser Bengali.

He was speaking at the launch of Pebble in the Pond: An Approach to Regional Development in Balochistan and Sindh at the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (Szabist) here on Monday.

The book is a result of a research collaboration between Dr Bengali and Mehnaz Hafeez, a Geographic Information System (GIS) analyst at the Ministry of Forests, Government of British Columbia, Canada. Through the book its co-authors have attempted to identify clusters of rural and urban settlements, and key settlements within the cluster with the capacity to act as engines of development.

The exercise involving economic analysis and application of geo-spatial technology has led to the identification of 20 cities in Sindh and 14 in Balochistan and 153 rural settlements in Sindh and 165 in Balochistan as potential growth centres.

“Sometime in 1980, I was on a road trip from Rawalpindi to Gilgit. On one side there were high mountains, on the other deep drops. It was here that I saw isolated settlements with families subsisting on patchy agriculture. One lone house perched high up on the mountain caught my attention and I wondered why this family had taken abode there. Clearly, it had no access to water or electricity and, certainly, none to education and healthcare. The only explanation could be the absence of employment opportunities elsewhere. That was the beginning of my interest in job-creating growth centres that could also provide basic social services and improve the quality of life. I view development like throwing a small stone in water. This is what the government is to do. It needs to throw in small stones in water and cause ripple effects,” said Dr Bengali.

Sharing a small part of her journey behind the book, co-author Mehnaz Hafeez, who joined online from Canada, said that if you cannot see how people live, you cannot work for their betterment.

“The people in the book belong to real communities with real challenges,” she said while adding that she used GIS to put them on the map and bring them into focus. “The mapping was followed by analysis as we saw how the clusters of communities were linked and how services were reaching them,” she added.

A PowerPoint presentation describing the book showed how villages in Balochistan and Sindh were mapped along with their population, road networks and water resources. It showed how villages comprising five to six houses only had one-room schools and dispensaries. But it was explained how one village in an area with a water source and road network can be selected as a growth centre and developed to have a good infrastructure with a school, a hospital, a marketplace and other services where the other people could either travel to for these services or migrate.

The idea is to cluster government services and facilities together to create the growth centres for more people instead of building one-room schools, dispensaries, etc., for every little village while spreading itself thin, it was explained.

Earlier, Dean, Social Science & Education Department, at Szabist Dr Riaz Shaikh introduced Dr Bengali as a “people’s economist, with a bigger vision for the downtrodden and marginalised people,” adding that he has dedicated his latest book to the development of Balochistan and Sindh.

“There is an internal colonisation in Pakistan where some areas see development while some are drastically ignored, like if there is attention given to developing highways, the ports are ignored,” Dr Shaikh pointed out.

Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2026