By: Rizwan Mahmood
Pakistan is facing the worse current account deficit at the moment. According to economists and finance minister of Pakistan, we are facing this issue because our imports bills are more than our exports bills. The current government have taken several initiatives to increase our exports, several relaxations have been given to private export sector which resulted in considerable increased number of exports.
But it’s not all, the government must take several other actions as well to cope with this issue. I am happy that our current government is taking this issue seriously and is willing to resolve it as soon as possible.
I would like to put prime minister’s attention towards a very important point which will definitely help to decrease cost of public sector procurement resulting increase in our foreign reserves and decrease current account deficit.
PROPOSED SOLUTION
In my opinion, government must review the import policy in public sector organizations and rather importing different equipment and engineering solutions from abroad we need to re-engineer all these items and solutions in our own country.
For this purpose, we must focus and promote research and development (R&D) in Pakistan.
As a first step, government must ban all unnecessary foreign imports in public departments and instruct all the departments to make lists of all items that are being imported from abroad. This can be done under the supervision of visionary research scholar like Dr. Attah-Ur-Rehman (or anyone else). A team should be formed which would start working to re-engineer all these items here in Pakistan.
It can be done by giving these items along with their operational manuals to different universities as case studies to assign these to their students as final year projects or by making a public sector R&D team to re-engineer our required items in our own country. If we can make tanks, tractors, nukes, sports items etc. then why not other things too?
I am sure, we can manufacture and develop all foreign procured items and solutions here in Pakistan. We just need a right direction and government support.
In this way we shall not only become self-sufficient in terms of technology, but we would also save a huge amount as foreign reserve which we spend against purchase of expensive foreign solutions and their spare parts. It will also create jobs contributing prime minister’s vision to create ten million job opportunities in his five years tenure.
The writer is Islamabad based IT Expert, A Poet, Consultant and Entrepreneur. He can be reached at [email protected]