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