Who Owns Pakistan - Yimg

whose privatization is scandal-free. Yet privatization continues to be the Achilles
heel of the present govt's economic policies.
While the ordinary tax payer is required, or was required till recently to disclose
the amount he was spending on education of his children, electricity, telephone,
there is no law requiring the super-rich to reveal how many textile mills, sugar
mills, industrial units they own. In 1970 Pakistan had 22 families. There number
seems to have increased to 220 or 2200 but only 50-60 of them are identifiable.
Nameless, faceless billionaires in Pakistan have made fortune in drugs (1.5
million dollars per annum, according to a United Nations International Drug
Control Programme Report in 1992), smuggling (1.5 billion dollars through
Afghanistan and India alone), graft, kickbacks and commissions (Rs 40-50 billion
according to Dr Mahboob ul Haq). These billionaires include businessmen and
industrialists, corrupt politicians, ever-corrupt and over-promoted bureaucrats,
retired generals and their offsprings.
How Herculean is the task to reform the state apparatus comprising nearly a
thousand state entities employing 2.7 million people can be illusterated by a
simple exemple.
Benazir Bhutto so accustomed to inaugurating bridges over rivers and roads,
after performing one such ceremony inquired about the manner in which toll was
levied over traffic passing over the new bridge. She did not receive a satisfactory
answer and therefore decided to set up a committee head by Deputy Chairman
Planning Commission Kazi Aleem Ullah to examine how toll should be levied on
bridges and roads in Pakistan.
That a political government did not know how to levy toll on bridges and
highways was the height of incompetence and Planning Commission needed to
set up a committee to examine the issue was the height of intellectual
dishonesty. To add salt to injury, the committee that was constituted to study the
issue was nothing but "brotherhood of thieves" , comprising same people and
organizations that were benefitting from the lawlessness in the collection of tolltax.
Not a single meeting of the committee was held and the business is as
usual.
For three months, I unsuccessfully tried to find out from the National Highway
Authority how and who impose toll on bridges and highways in Pakistan. It was
only through my own rudimentary methods that I found out that there was no
uniform or laid down rules about who and how toll was collected. Presently, toll
on 25-30 bridges was being collected by the National Highway Authority,
provincial govts and local bodies. A very big portion of the toll line the pockets of
the contractors and those who award the contract.
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