Still in the dark
Officially 74 per cent of Pakistan’s population is connected to the national power grid. Even those who have access to electricity have to do without it when they really need it. There has been a lack of investment in the power sector of late. We don’t generate enough electricity, and waste almost one-third of the total production in transmission. The power shortfalls are dragging down growth.
The country needs an annual investment of at least $3bn for the next 20 years to have any hope of eliminating the supply gap. It is against this background that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has announced what is being hailed as his government’s “power vision”. Inaugurating a rental power plant in Gujranwala on Sunday, he pledged to provide electricity to every nook and corner of the country by doubling Pakistan’s power generation capacity in 10 years from now and upgrading its languishing distribution infrastructure.
His government would forge partnerships with the two multilateral donors to secure their (financial and technical) support and encourage (foreign) private investors. The plan aims to take care of our electricity troubles by 2020. The aim is to pull the consumers out of perpetual darkness — even if they have to pay a very high price for that.
On the face of it, the plan is quite simple to execute: the government, which does not have resources, goes to the private investors and they rush to help us overcome our energy troubles. In real life, however, this is not how things happen. The government must realise that the private investors do not work for charity. More importantly, they prefer safer destinations where their investments are secure. Thus we can do little more than repeat what we have often said when we focus on foreign investment: Pakistan is far from being an ideal place.
Even if the government guaranteed attractive returns on foreign investments, it is unlikely to attract enough money because of poor security conditions in the country. Those who plan for the prime minister must take these realities into consideration to distinguish a real visionary measure from a rhetorical shot in the dark.
Internet censorship
The furore over the websites blocked last week by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority on the instructions of the Lahore High Court refuses to die down, and for good reason. At least 800 web pages and URLs have so far been blocked for Pakistan’s Internet users in an effort to restrict access to material considered blasphemous. The number may grow. However, apart from the Facebook link that called for the drawing of the Prophet (PBUH) — and which has now been removed — we have been given no explanation as to what exactly this objectionable material is.
There are a number of points to ponder. First, the LHC order referred to the caricatures’ site. On whose authority has access to the other sites been limited? The PTA may be guilty of overstepping its authority by extending the scope of the court’s order to apply the directive to websites of its own choosing. Second, given the other issues confronting Pakistan, there is the possibility that the accusation of ‘blasphemy’ is being used to cover up the attempt to suppress political criticism. Sites such as Facebook and YouTube have become a prominent tool for political activism and criticism. Third, blocking these sites constitutes outright censorship and a serious transgression of the individual’s right to access information of his or her choice on the Internet.
Pakistan cannot police the world. Blocking websites achieves nothing and only invites derision from the global community besides encouraging mischievous elements to undertake similarly offensive exercises in order to provoke a reaction. In shutting off access to these sites, the state is denying its citizens access to information — interestingly, one of the blocked pages is a Wikipedia discussion on the freedom of speech versus blasphemy. Lastly, bans like this simply do not work.
The only way to comprehensively control access to sections of the Internet is to stop Internet facilities altogether in the country. A number of ways to circumvent the blocked material are being communicated to Internet users who are thus able to access the website of their choice. Clearly, the PTA has failed to achieve its goals and has only been criticised for its arbitrary ways. It must be made to respect the right to information and restore the blocked websites immediately, leaving Internet users to decide for themselves what is or is not offensive.
There will always be a handful of people who will turn violent and shun a measured response to crass exercises such as the drawing event. But the answer is not to resort to practices that drag the country further back into the dark ages.
The human toll
AS another round of targeted killings subsides in Karachi, we are left to think about the cumulative toll this violence has taken on the families of the victims. Such killings are front-page news for a few days as the media concentrates on the mounting death toll, yet it is not often that we focus on the broken, devastated lives the victims’ families have to lead after the violence abates. According to figures collated by the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, over 90 people have lost their lives to targeted killings in Karachi since January. However, we overlook the fact that for each person killed, several family members are affected — financially and emotionally — and left to fend for themselves in an increasingly cutthroat society. Due to the growing frequency of these bouts of violence, both the media and the public are becoming more and more desensitised as the human tragedy gets lost in the swirl of figures for the dead and injured. Such numbness blocks the potential to contribute positively towards the rehabilitation of those directly affected by the tragedy.
As was reported in this paper, most of the people killed belong to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. They include labourers, push-cart vendors and watchmen. Not many have political affiliations. The media needs to remind the public that these victims were not mere numbers but actual people with families, jobs and friends. We need to know how their wives, children, parents and siblings are dealing with the aftermath of their deaths. We need to know who will put food on the families’ table now that the sole breadwinner has gone. Perhaps if we are reminded of these disturbing realities often enough, we, as a society can exercise greater pressure on the authorities to take action to end this brutal trend of targeted killings.