President for focused efforts to explore minerals: President Dr. Arif Alvi emphasized the importance of close, meaningful, and effective collaboration between the federal and provincial governments, local governments, and the public and private sectors to promote investment in the country’s mining and minerals sectors on Monday. He said this while addressing a meeting of various private and public sector stakeholders relating to the exploration of minerals in Pakistan at Aiwan-e-Sadr. Senior officials of the ministry of energy (petroleum division), the ministry of commerce, the federal board of revenue, and the government of Gilgit-Baltistan attended the meeting. The president said Pakistan was bestowed with enormous high-quality mineral resources, like coal, copper, gold, gemstones, silver, and rare metals, which needed to be explored and mined by employing information-technology-based modern mining tools and processes to realize the full potential of the mining sector of the country to bring visible change in the socio-economic development of the country. He said that different parts of Pakistan were rich in minerals, oil, natural gas, rare metals, nuclear substances, as well as precious metals like gold, silver, copper, zinc, and many other minerals of industrial use which, if exploited fully by creating state-of-the-art refining and metallurgical processes in the country, could help Pakistan meet the local demand of the industry and would earn precious foreign exchange by exporting value-added mineral and metal products. The president said that issues relating to licensing for mining processes needed to be evolved, exports of precious metal appliances and withholding taxation policies needed to be targeted for promoting the exploration of this hidden wealth, besides following the international standards and best practices of mining and exploration. The President emphasized the need for the use of satellite imagery technology and the use of modern mineral detection, analysis, and exploration technologies and the training of relevant human resources in modern and safe mining methods to make mining processes efficient, effective, and safe. He called upon the stakeholders to conduct workshops and seminars to discuss and review the existing policies and relevant laws, rules, and procedures to identify the loopholes and develop a comprehensive set of proposals and recommendations for the government to factor in while devising policies for the growth and development of mining and mineral exploration in the country. The president underlined the need to develop an effective research and development mechanism for exploration, refining, and the creation of value-added mineral products by looping in relevant universities and research and development departments of the public and private sectors. He also called for strengthening the capability and effectiveness of border control to stop unlawful exports and imports of mineral and metal-based products to protect the local industry.