A recipe for progress
By Dr Atta-ur-Rahman

Part - I

As Pakistan struggles to recover from the enormous mess left behind by the previous government due to rampant corruption which more than doubled our national debt and sent prices skyrocketing, the question is what the present government should do to put things back on track. The key problems it faces relate to energy, law and order, and socio-economic development which need to be resolved by implementing a well-thought-out road map for transitioning to a knowledge economy.

On the energy front, a concrete document has been prepared by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, clearly laying out what the government should do. It presents what went wrong and how it must be urgently rectified. This includes the change from oil based energy generation to hydroelectric power, coal based technologies and wind energy, with the simultaneous exploration of shale oil and shale gas of which there are an abundance of resources in the country.

However, for true progress our leaders must realise that the key lies in education. It is only through investing massively in our children that Pakistan can emerge from the depths to which we have sunk. This requires hard decisions to be taken – today.

First, a national educational emergency should be declared and compulsory education for all should be made mandatory under law. The budget allocated for all sectors including defence should be slashed by the Federal and Provincial governments and the funds diverted to education so that the allocation to education can be increased from the present 1.9 percent of GDP to 7 percent of GDP. This is what Mahathir Mohammed did in Malaysia, with 25-30 percent of the annual budget going to education.

It should be ensured that at least a quarter of the educational budget in provinces and in the centre is allocated to higher education, because that is what will have the maximum impact if we wish to transition to a knowledge economy. This is also the international norm. In the case of Pakistan only about 12 percent of the already very low educational budget goes to higher education.

Within the education sector, engineering must be given the highest priority as it is directly related to industrial development and defence. The programme I had envisaged to set up world-class engineering universities in partnership with Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Austria, Korea, China and Japan should be revived. Under this initiative partnership agreements had been signed with 30 top foreign universities to start their engineering degree courses in Pakistan. Our students would have benefited from high quality education and received degrees from top foreign universities without ever going abroad.

Each university had planned to have a strong technology park within its premises and many foreign companies (Siemens, Eriksson etc) had expressed willingness to establish their Research and Development centres within these technology parks. This would have allowed Pakistan to emerge as an Asian tiger with new models of the latest engineering goods, household appliances, mobile telephones and a host of other items for export.

With so many foreign engineering universities and with some 60 R&D centres operated by the world’s giant companies in Pakistan, we had the potential of becoming the most powerful engineering base in the region. Classes were to start in October 2008, but the programme was shelved in May 2008 by the former government. Shahbaz Sharif was very keen at the time to start the programmes with the German and Austrian universities operating in Lahore and with the Swedish University in Sialkot and meetings had been held between him and the visiting foreign delegations. The time is ripe now for the CM to restart this programme.

To become an Asian tiger, Pakistan must focus on several critically important issues. One is the status of the Higher Education Commission, which was badly mauled by attacks from a former federal minister of education with forged degrees, strongly supported by a gang of about 200 ‘honourable’ parliamentarians.

The government should immediately take the following steps regarding the HEC: (1) appoint a chairman after a merit-based process involving recommendations from a committee of scholars; (2) restore the powers of federal secretary to the HEC’s executive director which was taken away in a fit of anger by the previous government; (3) restore the powers of the HEC to hold Departmental Development Working Party (DDWP); and (4) declare the formation of the Sindh HEC illegal since the Supreme Court has already ruled in April 2011 that under the 18th Amendment, higher education is a federal subject and devolution to the provinces is illegal and unconstitutional.

Another important institution is the Ministry of Science & Technology. It should have a development budget of at least Rs100 billion but has been allocated only about Rs3 billion, indicating the depths to which our country has sunk in its neglect of science. In this day of science and innovation, the ministry has a central role to play for Pakistan to transition to a knowledge economy. We need to strengthen this vitally important ministry so that agricultural yields can be increased, industrial efficiencies improved, self-reliance in defence equipment manufacture attained and our exports of high value industrial goods magnified a hundred fold over the next decade.

There is a tendency in Pakistan to ignore all that has been done before to avoid ‘credit’ from going to previous governments. This is myopic thinking and we are constantly going round in vicious circles.

Our honourable minister for planning and development is engaged in preparing another vision document for Pakistan. A number of vision documents exist including the 2010 Vision prepared under his guidance and the 2030 Vision prepared by Dr Akram Sheikh, former deputy chairman Planning Commission.

A comprehensive 300-page document, ‘Technology Based Industrial Vision and Strategy for Pakistan’s Socio-economic Development’ was prepared under my supervision and approved by the Cabinet in August 2007. It lays out a time-bound action plan regarding the specific projects that Pakistan must launch immediately in each sector to have a maximum impact on poverty alleviation and socio-economic development. Unfortunately it is gathering dust in government archives.

My humble advice is that it is now time to act, rather than spend our time preparing another long-term vision. We all know what is to be done. It is time to go ahead and do it. . We should prepare a time bound action plan within the next 20 days and begin implementing a very aggressive strategy from the beginning of the new year with a single focus: to transition to a knowledge based economy. It is time to act. A ‘business as usual’ approach is a sure recipe for disaster.

To be continued

The writer is the president of thePakistan Academy of Sciences and former chairman of the HEC.Email: ibne_sina@hotmail.com