The Punjab budget

Punjab Finance Minister Sardar Hasnain Dreshak's budget speech on Thursday had a beautiful beginning and an even more beautiful ending. In between, the blanks were filled in by his secretary.

Among the priorities of his government, he listed an improvement of law and order, provision of justice, access to educational and medical facilities and the availability of potable water.

He ended by saying that the main objective of his government was to abolish poverty. Among the steps taken to alleviate poverty, he announced with some pride the exemption of five-marla residential houses from the payment of property tax.

How many among the poorest of the poor have the wherewithal to build such houses was left unexplained. Mr Dreshak called his budget pro-people and pauper-friendly.

The main contours of the budget 2004-05 are: a 42 per cent increase in development outlay, equity financial arrangements for mega-projects like the Lahore Ring Road, New Murree, the Jallo Theme Park, etc.

In investment in strategic sectors, the pride of place goes to justice and law and order, educational and medical reforms, water supply and sanitation, communications, irrigation, agriculture and livestock.

The Annual Development Plan is estimated to cost a record Rs43.44 billion, up 42 per cent over 2003-04. Water management gets a mere Rs400 million and a bit. This is far from adequate as the province rapidly runs out of its tapped resources in this vital sector.

Water and power together get Rs5,327 million. Among the major initiatives are the rehabilitation of the Thal Canal, the construction of 13 small dams in the rain-fed areas of the province, and the lining of irrigation channels in the non-perennial districts.

Once the granary of the subcontinent, Punjab is slowly but surely moving towards desertification and faces grave food shortages in the years ahead. The five rivers are drying up; even the Indus is but a pale shadow of its majestic past.

As the fearful pressure of population increases on depleting water resources, the future looks bleak, indeed. Also, it is surprising that no separate funds have been earmarked for the uplift of rural areas in the province's backward southern and western districts, while Rs7 billion have been allocated for improving basic urban facilities in southern Punjab.

The budget claims to have given the highest priority to education with an outlay of Rs8,230 which is 38 per cent higher than in the outgoing year. Work will continue on the new universities in Sargodha, Faisalabad, Gujrat and the college of engineering and technology in Gujranwala.

Considering the state of affairs in the Punjab University, one does not see the wisdom of setting up more general universities in the province. An "important innovative policy" is the adoption of the concept of private-public sector partnership which includes BOT (build, operate and transfer).

This is funny because the Punjab government has, for all practical purposes, abdicated its obligation to educate the masses in favour of a particularly rapacious private sector.

This, then, is a bird's eye view of Punjab Vision 2020 by which year the province seeks to achieve "full employment, full literacy, a highly educated, skilled and talented workforce, a tolerant and a culturally sophisticated society, full integration with the world economy and an affluent and healthy populace". The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating thereof. Economic arthritis has no known cure.

Exploiting misery

Only the hard-hearted officials in the interior ministry and its allied agencies would have remained unmoved by the story published yesterday about the death of three illegal Pakistani immigrants in the UAE.

Two of them died of starvation and a third of injuries received when he was shot by border guards in the Gulf state. Their decomposed bodies were found days later. They are not the first nor will be the last persons to fall victim to unemployment, ignorance and official indifference.

Reports of Pakistanis dying of suffocation stuffed in vans carrying them to cherished destinations in the West, of Pakistanis arrested and rotting in jails abroad and of Pakistanis humiliated and deported fill newspaper columns every month.

Two years ago, a group of Pakistani migrants were murdered in Macedonia and the crime passed off as the killing of "Islamic militants" by the country's then interior minister, a right-wing politician who is now in disgrace.

This was an extreme case, but the flow of people from Pakistan going out on false promises of jobs after paying hefty sums to travel agents and immigration racketeers is a steady one.

Pakistanis are discovered in the oddest of places, such as Madagascar, apparently a staging post for smuggling of humans to other destinations. Many of those sponsoring this trade are well known to the authorities, and yet nothing is done to prevent this constant exploitation of credulous and frustrated youth from the rural and less developed areas of the country.

A recent report from Lahore stated that "immigration consultant" firms implicated in smuggling people were still doing business in the city. The federal interior minister said the other day that all possible corrective measures would be taken at airports to check illegal migrants.

Experience shows that such "corrective measures" usually only provide more opportunities to immigration staff to extort more money from intending migrants and to harass lawful travellers.

The issue has to be taken up more seriously. Unemployment has to be addressed in the rural areas and radio and television should be utilized to warn people about the hazards waiting for them if they go out illegally.

Another political murder?

Yet another politician has been gunned down in Karachi, adding to the long list of assassinations that have rocked the nation's biggest city. On Thursday, Mr Munawwar Suhrawardy, PPP information secretary and party chairperson Benazir Bhutto's close confidant, was shot and killed in broad daylight - the second PPP leader to be assassinated in a matter of three months.

On March 6, unknown gunmen had murdered MPA Abdullah Murad Baloch. If it is established that Mr Suhrawardy's killing was political in nature, then that will take Karachi's toll of such incidents to three - Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai was gunned down on May 30.

Mr Suhrawardy's murder serves to highlight the acute law and order situation in Karachi. More, it shows the ease with which people can be eliminated. The two gunmen who shot him escaped, leaving the badly injured Mr Suhrawardy to hail a rickshaw to reach a hospital as blood flowed from his wounds.

We are concerned here with a phenomenon that has held Karachi in its grip for nearly two decades - politics of violence, terror and intimidation. Many groups now firmly believe that political rivals should be tackled not by political means but through violence, threat of force or outright murder.

The list of those who fell victim to targeted killing is long and spine-chilling. But some of the names come readily to mind: Zahoorul Hasan Bhopali, Azam Tariq, Hakim Said, Murtaza Bhutto, Maulana Yusuf Ludhianvi, Maulana Saleem Qadri, and many more.

One does not know where all this will lead to, unless all political parties wake up to this cancerous growth in Pakistan's body politic. The politics of murder and mayhem does not solve any problems; it only worsens it.

Basically, this is a political problem and cannot be solved by administrative means alone. It is time all political parties developed a consensus on the need for conducting politics politically, and agree to ostracize elements that believe in violence as a political tool.