Daily Times

It has been almost three years since its announcement, but we are still waiting for the detailed plan on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Both parties have made several revelations over time, but there are still many ambiguities that need to be cleared out. The Ministry of Planning, Development and Reform released along-term plan of CPEC a while ago, and it came out as a disappointment to anyone who was looking forward to gaining concrete and methodical information.

People need to trust their government and its policies to pave the way for as mooth and steady development process. However, given Pakistan’s political and governance history, we had three military regimes and stood among top corrupt nations in the world, it is quite difficult for anyone to have confidence in the state. Instead of focusing entirely on portraying a perfect picture of future, the government’s first step should have been to win the trust of the educated citizens at least, if not the masses; and they cannot do that unless they ensure ‘transparency’.

If you read the document titled ‘Long-Term Plan’, you will feel like you have travelled back to your childhood and are reading a Pakistan studies textbook; it puts forward some ambitious goals along with very promising outcomes without grounded-in-reality numbers that can be used to corroborate this panacea-like development plan. The primary short-term goal is to address fundamental bottlenecks to Pakistan’s social and economic development by 2020.

A person does not have to be an economist to know that these bottlenecks are the deprivation of health and education. 2020 is not far, and Pakistan’s literacy rate is 58 percent — that is less than Bangladesh (75.4 percent), Sri Lanka (93.3 percent) and India (74.04 percent). The government is spending less than one percent of its GDP on health sector against at least six percent benchmark set by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Once the condition of basic necessities improves, we can move forward to more significant and long-term goals by 2030.

A critical pillar of infrastructure projects financed by the Chinese is the capacity enhancement of existing railway lines and construction of new railway networks to make them compatible with international modernised transportation systems. When you go to official website of CPEC and try to get detailed data on these projects, all you get is very brief progress update stating that ‘JCC agreed in principle for the inclusion of Rail Based Mass Transit Systems in Provincial headquarters as part of CPEC and projects have been commenced.’

This is just one example. Many medium-term and long-term plans exist on the document without any detailed information available. For instance, improvement and technological advancement in the agriculture sector are one of the cooperation areas, but there is no methodical layout or agenda on how and when every specific project will be carried out. Researchers and analysts can help in promoting and advocating CPEC, but they want certain information in the form of ‘data’ like cost figures, decrease in transportation distance, and decrease in transit time, etc.

The government is spending less than one percent of its GDP on the health sector against at least six percent benchmark set by the World Health Organisation

The only document where you get some numbers is the Public Sector Development Program (PSDP) financed projects. This data set is solely for cost variables and is available for two fiscal years. Most of the projects fall under the category of physical infrastructure. The only social infrastructure project stated in PSDP 2016-17 was related to upgrading Gwadar hospital under the status ‘unapproved’. Unfortunately, it was not even considered in the report of the fiscal year 2017-18. For the current year, ‘Establishment of National Institutes of Applied Technologies and Specialised Research Centres to support CPEC Initiatives’ is the only human development project that made it to the list but only as an ‘unapproved’ project.

The ultimate target of medium-term goals and vision 2025 is to make way for inclusive growth which requires supplementing physical infrastructure development (transportation, energy, information technology and financial capital) with adequate provision of social infrastructure (health and education).

I understand that CPEC’s Long-Term Plan is a live document, and there will be a new long-term plan in two years, but this is the first one in three years, and we have to wait another two years for the next one. I expected this long-term plan to answer ‘What is’ and ‘How it is’ but I found myself juggling many ‘What should be’. I do not understand why Planning and Development Commission kept on giving recommendations to itself? You are the policymakers; you are supposed to take actions while informing us about your plan of actions. If you want us to trust you blindly and wait till the end of long-term projects, then I, as a student of economics, would deny doing so, because ‘in the long run we are all dead’, as said by the great economist John Maynard Keynes.

It is also mentioned in the document that Pakistan and China welcome intellectual support from international community and then later it is suggested to establish a database where all the information will be available. In my opinion, they cannot have the former in the absence of the latter.

This proposition holds true also for Pakistani and Chinese nationals. Instead of luring us into a fairytale in which Pakistan is the ‘Asian Tiger’, both governments should make data and information more transparent and accessible; and establishing a databank could be the first step in this regard.  I, and every Pakistani hope that our government takes sincere action before it’s too late and these projects face the same destiny as did the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Pakistan.

The writer is a PhD scholar at University of Bremen, Germany

Published in Daily Times, February 7^th 2018.