DAWN Editorials - 5th May 2025

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Doing business

IT need not have come to this. A week ago, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi had to issue a formal guarantee to foreign investors that their investments would be “secured at all costs”.

According to news reports, the interior minister assured a delegation of foreign investors that the authorities had taken notice of recent “attacks by miscreants” and that “legal action was being taken” against them. While details were scant, it seemed from the minister’s remarks that violence targeting foreign fast-food chains was a major discussion point on the investors’ agenda.

Allegedly instigated by a religio-political party, mobs had attacked and vandalised at least 10 fast-food outlets in different parts of the country early in April, during nationwide protests against the violence being perpetrated on Gaza. In one such incident, a restaurant worker was fatally shot by unidentified miscreants. The question is, where was the state when the attacks kept occurring day after day?

Promises and guarantees ring hollow after preventable loss of life and property has already taken place. And they serve little by way of assuring investors when there are many other accompanying examples of state failures resulting in business disruptions.

Consider, for example, that some of Pakistan’s most important logistics routes remained shut for 10 days because of a political dispute over new canal projects that the authorities had long refused to address. News reports stated that road closures by protesters in Sindh had forced many local manufacturers to suspend production due to raw material shortages, and even threatened a fuel shortage upcountry. The blockade also left millions of dollars’ worth of exports stranded on the highways, besides bringing much of domestic commerce to a standstill.

Throughout that period, the state did little but watch and wait while businesses suffered the costs of its catastrophic miscalculation on the canal issue. And who can forget last year, when the entire IT industry was made to suffer while the authorities toyed with Pakistan’s internet services on various pretexts.

These are just a few of the many ‘unforeseen yet not unexpected’ disruptions investors routinely face. Due to the prevailing sociopolitical instability and because its institutions are weak and the state has gradually undermined its own writ, investors face a heightened risk that their routine business operations may be completely upended at a moment’s notice.

This ‘normalised unpredictability’ is anathema to the operational continuity and development of businesses, as its risks and costs are invariably borne by them. Given how much time it invests in attracting investors to Pakistan, it is inexplicable why the government does not put in consistent effort to ensure the rule of law, the absence of which is what eventually drives investors away. Addressing symptoms of the problem but not its root causes can only yield temporary successes.

Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2025


Destination unknown

PAKISTANI politicians love to punch above their weight. With the return of the PML-N to power, it was but natural to expect the comeback of large infrastructure projects that could capture the public imagination and keep people in thrall at least for an entire election cycle. It does not matter whether the government has the money for such fancy projects or whether they are actually executed. The ‘bullet train’ project has that kind of power of pushing unsuspecting voters in Punjab to pursue an illusion. Recently, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz formed a working group to look into the feasibility of operating a high-speed train between the two power nodes of Lahore and Rawalpindi in the province. Her media team has been branding the scheme as the first bullet train project in Pakistan. But, as they say, what’s in a name? One can call it anything as long as it can cut the travel time between the two cities to less than two and a half hours. The question, however, is whether Pakistan is ready for a bullet train, or a high-speed train, at all?

Her father, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, had also dreamt of running a bullet train between Peshawar and Karachi during his last term. However, the Chinese response, when he went to them for financing and technology for the project, woke him up. More or less the same financial and technical hurdles have been pointed out by experts to the much smaller and slower train project of the Punjab chief minister. But again, one is constrained to ask: are we ready for such trains? Do we even need them? There are no two opinions about modernising and upgrading the existing dilapidated railway infrastructure for safer and faster connectivity for both passenger traffic and trade. But that does not require bullet trains or high-speed trains. The focus should be on upgrading the entire railway infrastructure and expanding the rail network under the Mainline project rather than creating islands for fancy trains. Even the revised ML-1 scheme would nearly treble the speed to 140-160kmph, which should be sufficient for our needs for many decades to come. There are countries that do not have bullet trains. Yet their railways provide efficient, reliable and comfortable facilities to the passengers. We must learn to walk before we can run. Or be prepared to stumble along the way once again.

Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2025


Wounded childhood

PAKISTAN is unkind to its children. The NCRC’s State of Children in Pakistan Report 2024 scans the grim circumstances our young are forced to navigate, and spells out the systemic apathy towards their safety, health and progress. It asserts that the country faces tremendous difficulties in safeguarding the rights of 112m children — 40pc of the population — with inconsistencies in health and education: over 26m children between five to 16 years of age are out of school amid a ‘learning crisis’, and one in two among under-five-year-olds is malnourished, while child protection is in a shambles. The first half of 2024 saw 862 reported cases of child abuse, 668 cases of abduction, 82 incidents of missing children, 18 cases of child marriage, and 48 of pornography after sexual abuse.

Every alarm bell seems to falls on deaf ears as the state ignores the entrenched malady that needs urgent and aggressive treatment. Pakistan’s extended lassitude exists despite the fact that it is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Article 25-A of the Constitution, which declares that the state is duty-bound to provide free and compulsory education to children aged five and 16. A society that cannot guarantee child rights facilitates large-scale childhood trauma and deprivation, which turns into permanent vulnerability to mental health issues, stress, violence, drug abuse and more, shaping individuals who are unable to adjust their emotional responses to people and circumstances. In short, the socioeconomic cost of neglected children and exploitation is disastrous. As statutes and conventions remain lifeless, successive governments have not felt compelled to keep pace with the scale of the problem. The government must demonstrate more responsibility by adopting certain recommendations in the report — “investing in early childhood development, strengthening child protection systems, and ensuring education and healthcare services”. A child’s safety, progress and agency are not optional.

Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2025