This does not mean that no attention was paid to this sector. But a lot more should have been done to address some the sector’s key problem areas, including adopting less wasteful methods of irrigation and developing crops with higher per-acre yields than the existing varieties.

Agriculture accounted for over 25 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP in 1995. According to the latest estimates, however, the GDP share of agriculture has fallen by more than 5 percentage points since 1995. The annual growth in agriculture has varied between a high of 11.7 per cent in 2001 to a low of negative growth in 2001, when severe drought conditions badly hit the agricultural sector during 2000-02.

Apart from the period of drought, however, the decline in the GDP share of agriculture in recent years suggests that the government of President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz did not pay sufficient attention to tackling some of the key problems of the agricultural sector, despite the fact that it is the mainstay of Pakistan’s economy.

Even Pakistan’s large-scale manufacturing sector is mainly agriculture based, with the textile industry accounting for more than 60 per cent of the country’s total exports. This makes it all the more important that the new PPP-led coalition government should give the highest priority to addressing the problems of the agricultural sector, including the key issues of water-conservation irrigation methods and developing varieties of crops with a higher yield per acre.

Flood-plain irrigation is one of the most wasteful forms of using water to grow crops. Excessive reliance on this form of irrigation, coupled with a higher demand for water needed by a growing population, has made Pakistan an increasingly water-stressed country. The per capita availability of water today is less than half of what it was fifty years ago, underscoring the need to tackle this problem on a crash programme basis.

Efforts in this regard have to be commensurate with the magnitude of the problem, if they are to have a significant impact. This means that tokenism – the bane of so many development programmes in this country – simply will not do.

You can’t shoot an elephant with a pea-shooter. This may be a truism; yet it is a truism that is often been ignored by government planners in this country. It is high time that this sort of tokenism approach to development was abandoned and replaced by an approach more in keeping with a country that now has a population of an estimated 170 million, which is growing at a very high rate of about 2.4 per cent a year.

According to figures compiled by the Government of Pakistan and the World Bank, the average annual growth rate of crop production between 1995 and 2004 lagged behind the population growth rate of 2.4 per cent. Figure 1 presents an interesting comparison of the growth in the yield and output of four major crops (cotton, rice, sugar cane and wheat) in Pakistan during the period ten-year period 1995-2005.

During this period, sugar cane production was stagnant, but the production of the other three major crops grew by about two per cent per annum. However, even this growth was negated by the 2.4 per cent growth in population during the same period.

There are two lessons to be derived from this fact. One, we need to reduce population growth to 1.5 per cent or less in order to make GDP growth more meaningful on a per capita basis, not just in the agricultural sector but in the economy as a whole. Two, we need to develop varieties of major crops that have a higher yield per acre than our present varieties.

An international survey conducted a few years ago found that although Pakistan was ranked sixth in the world in acreage under sugar cane, it was ranked 18th in the world in the total quantity of sugar cane produced per year. Translating the results of the survey into maunds per acre showed that Hawaii had an average yield of 1,800 maunds per acre, the Philippines had an average yield of 1,100 maunds per acre and Cuba had an average yield of 900 maunds per acre. But Pakistan had an average yield of only 300 maunds per acre. Nothing better illustrates the need for Pakistan to urgently develop crop varieties with higher yields per acre.

Despite this low average yield per acre, however, Pakistan produced about 55 million tons of sugar cane in 2007. Farmers converted several million tons of sugar cane into ‘gur’ for their own use and supplied the rest to Pakistan’s 72 sugar mills. The sugar cane processed by these mills gave the country an output of about five million tons of refined sugar in 2007.

But imagine what the results would have been if Pakistan’s average yield per acre under sugar cane cultivation had been at par with, say, Cuba. In that event, our total sugar cane crop would have been around 165 million tons last year, which would have given us a total output of about 15 million tons of refined sugar in 2007.

That would have made us one of the world’s leading exporters of refined sugar, enabling us to earn a large amount of foreign exchange. That, in turn, would have helped us to reduce our burgeoning trade deficit, ease pressure of our balance of payments, and slow down the on-going erosion in our foreign exchange reserves – which have fallen alarmingly by over $ 6.5 billion since September last year.

This example aptly illustrates the fact that Pakistan urgently needs to develop high-yielding varieties of crops and introduce them to its farmers on a wide scale, just as it introduced high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice to its farmers in the 1960s, under a scheme that came to be known as the Green Revolution.

The Green Revolution helped Pakistan to become largely self-sufficient in food, despite a high population growth rate, which saw the population of today’s Pakistan (the former West Pakistan) increase from 37 million at the time of the first post-Independence National Census in 1951 to an estimated 170 million today (the exact figure will not be known until the National Census scheduled for October 2008).

Given Pakistan’s burgeoning population, a shortage of fresh water is likely to be the most serious resource problem the country will face in the years ahead. To compound the problem, global warming is troubling irrigated basins like the Indus, where some 75 per cent of the cropland is irrigated.

New storage reservoirs will also have to be built on the Indus and other rivers to compensate for the reduction in storage capacity of the existing reservoirs – Tarbela and Mangla – due to silting.

There are several reasons to expect water shortages to grow worse. These include further increases in irrigated land for boosting food production to feed a growing population; and growth in the country’s urban population, requiring a large increase in water supplies.

Another serious long-term problem is salination. When irrigation water soaks down into the soil, it absorbs mineral salts from the earth, flushing them to the surface. As the water evaporates, these salts dry out on the fields, gradually destroying their fertility. According to one estimate, some 25 per cent of Pakistan’s cultivated land has been damaged in this way. Recovering poisoned fields is vastly expensive. The environmental damage done by ill-managed irrigation schemes is a time bomb that threatens to reverse the progress in food production made by past schemes.

Pakistan is currently using half its available run-off, that is, the water that falls on the country and is collected in rivers, lakes and streams, and is drawing half as much again from underground springs and acquifiers.

It has been estimated that by 2025 demand will reach 92 per cent of the entire run-off. So Pakistan faces an awkward choice. Either it must reduce the amount of water used by farmers’ or it must make huge investments to develop new supplies and build more storage reservoirs. Feeding Pakistan in the years ahead will require such gigantic schemes to be successful – or it will require farmers to use water more efficiently.

At present only one-third of the water used for irrigation actually goes into making plants grow – the rest is wasted. Using water more efficiently would also bring environmental benefits.

Cities and their demands will also grow. In 1951, there was only one urban agglomeration in Pakistan with more than a million people: Karachi. Today, there are more than a dozen, with Karachi alone now at an estimated 14 million, Lahore at 8 million, and several others at well over a million.

Water supplies are also essential for industrial development. Up to now, few Pakistani cities have found their industrial development circumscribed by water shortages, and that is a considerable achievement. With competing demands for water, however, such shortages are likely to occur with increasing frequency in the years ahead.

Water supply in the lower Indus basin is falling behind agricultural and urban demand, particularly in Karachi where population growth exceeds the physical and institutional capacity of the public water system. Conflict between the provinces on the sharing of Indus basin water obstructs cooperation on lower basin water issues.

Of the 140 million acre feet (maf) of water annually available in Pakistan in a normal year, some 40 maf reach the Indus delta (though it has been much less in recent years). The delta supports important fish and shellfish industries. The lower reaches of the river have several unique riparian species, but are ecologically stressed by upstream impounding of fresh water and sediment.

In recent decades, surface irrigation and drainage problems have stimulated massive groundwater development involving hundreds of thousands of public and private tubewells. In May 2001, the Musharraf-Aziz government directed the Water and Power Development Authority to install another 20,000 tubewells to augment groundwater supplies. But a great many more than 20,000 will be needed to meet the growing demand.

Meanwhile, Wapda selected several projects for the development of surface water resources for fast-track implementation. They included the Rainee Canal, the Kachhi Canal, the Kurram Tangi Dam and the Mirani Dam.

The Rainee Canal project is located on the left bank of the River Indus downstream of Guddu Barrage, from which the main canal for the Thar/Rainee lower canals will offtake.

The project will provide water for the irrigation of about 412,400 acres of agricultural land and water supply to the local population.

Studies for the project are being carried out by Wapda.

A PC-II proforma for Rs 138 million for detailed engineering design and preparation of project tender documents has been approved by the Central Development Working Party (CDWP).

The topography of canal alignment has been completed by Wapda, while 95 per cent of the topographical survey work for the canal-command area assigned to the Army Survey Group has also been completed. Tenders for the earthwork of Stage 1 have been awarded.

For the Kachhi Canal project, a barrage is proposed to be built across the Indus at Mithan Kot, from which a gravity-flow canal will be constructed to irrigate about 513,000 acres of land in the Kachhi plain, along the right bank of the Pat Feeder Canal.

The command area of the project is located in the Dera Bugti, Kohlu and Naseerabad districts of Balochistan.

About 5,000 cubic feet per second (cusecs) of water will be carried through the new canal parallel to the existing Dera Ghazi Khan Canal and Dajal Branch Canal, about 100 miles of which will be in Punjab and 150 miles in Balochistan.

The project also includes the construction of a new irrigation distribution system for fallow but fertile land in Balochistan.

Work is in progress to carry out a topographic survey of the command area, which has been assigned to the Survey of Pakistan. A PC-II proforma for Rs 170 million for detailed engineering design and preparation of project tender documents has been approved by the CDWP.

The Kurram Tangi Dam project is located on the Kurram River in the North Waziristan Agency, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of the NWFP. The dam site is 22 km upstream of the Kurram Garahi headworks and 32 km north of Bannu.

The scheme will create a storage dam for conserving a large amount of flood water in the Kurram and Kaitu rivers, which will add to the storage in the existing irrigation area of 278,000 acres. The stored water will also be used to irrigate about 84,500 acres of new areas, under perennial irrigation. The project will also generate hydro electricity.

A PC-II proforma for Rs 125 million for the preparation of a feasibility study, detailed engineering design and project tender documents has been approved by the CDWP.

The government has also allocated Rs 12.8 billion for construction of the dam.

The Mirani Dam project was completed two years ago. It is located on the Dasht River about 48 km west of Turbat in the Mekran region of Balochistan.

The Mirani Dam reservoir has the capacity to store 302,000 acre-feet of water for flood control and to irrigate 32,000 acres of land on the right and left banks of the Dasht River. The scheme may also supply water to the new port at Gwadar.

Looking ahead in a worldwide context (from which Pakistan is certainly not immune), a shortage of fresh water is probably going to be the most serious resource problem the world will face in 2020. As with food, the problem is not one of global shortages but one of uneven distribution.

Three-quarters of the fresh water on the planet is held in the polar icecaps and glaciers and so is unavailable for use. Where water is plentiful (e.g., in the Scandinavian countries and New Zealand), people are frequently few and vice versa. The most water-rich country in terms of the run-off from rainfall to population is Iceland, with more than 500,000 cubic metres per person per year; the most water-poor is Egypt, with just 0.02 cubic metres per person per year.

Even in countries where water is scarce, enormous amounts are frequently used by farmers to irrigate land. This is what has been happening in Pakistan for the last fifty years. More large-scale reservoirs and more efficient techniques of irrigation (e.g., drip-irrigation) are urgently needed in order to ensure that large chunks of Pakistan do not end up as deserts.

No number of press conferences or seminars can solve the problem. What is needed is action, action and more action – starting not five years from now or ten years from now, but today. In China, they have self-reliance. In Pakistan, we have seminars on self reliance. That’s the difference. We need to learn lessons from China and act upon them urgently.

These passage-booking instructions soon got abbreviated on P & O’s tickets to Port Out, Starboard Home, which, in turn, got further abbreviated to the acronym POSH. Because these cabins were cooler, they cost more than starboard cabins on the way out and port cabins on the way back. Thus it was that the word posh was born, meaning something that was swanky and therefore cost a lot. It wasn’t long before the word passed into the language.

The word is still around, though P & O passenger ships stopped sailing to Karachi long ago. Indeed, there are no longer any passenger ships that sail from Europe to Karachi, not even ships belonging to the Italy-based Lloyd Trestino Shipping Line, which remained in service until the late 1960s – sailing from Genoa, in Italy, via Port Said and Aden to Karachi, then on to Bombay (I refuse to call it Mumbai), Colombo, Singapore, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Manila, and back.

The round-trip from Karachi to Hong Kong and back to Karachi on Lloyd Trestino’s vessels – M.V Asia and M.V. Victoria – took a month and cost Rs 13,000 per passenger in first class. This was a very good deal indeed given the fact that it included passengers being allowed to sleep in their cabins even while the ship was in port, thus allowing you to avoid paying steep charges for hotel rooms. And because the ships used to stay in port for two or three days en route, it gave you a chance not only to shop till you dropped but also to see something of the country.

My first cousin Ajaz Anis and I, along with our respective spouses, traveled first-class on M.V. Asia from Karachi to Hong Kong and back in January 1963. The problem with traveling first-class, however, was that most of the other first-class passengers were old fogies who weren’t exactly the life and soul of the party in the evening, while the tourist-class passengers were a much younger lot. We soon discovered that the tourist section was where all the fun was, especially when it came to shaking a leg on the dance floor in the evening. The upshot was that we took to spending our evenings in the tourist section, and a good time was had by all.

As we were entering Bombay harbour, I happened to be standing on deck by the railing next to an elderly English lady, watching the city’s approaching skyline. Looking at the scene, the elderly lady said to me, “You know, it all looks very different from when I was last here. Of course, that was 60 years ago!” “Yes,” I replied, straight-faced, “it must have been very different 60 years ago.” Of such moments is life made.

When the Asia got to Hong Kong, it stayed in port for three days, giving us plenty of time to shop like crazy. Manila, too, proved to be a shopper’s paradise, for things like replicas of its famous bamboo church-organ. By the time we got back to Karachi a month later, we had – between the four of us – 68 pieces of luggage of assorted shapes and sizes, including movie cameras, 16mm movie-projectors, record-players, crockery-sets, you name it.

Man, it is said, is a creature of habit. That’s why people tend to frown upon and suspect anything that is new. When in 1585 Sir Francis Drake (of Spanish Armada fame) brought the potato from America to Britain, the people of Elizabethan England shunned the strange tuber. For a long time, in fact, they decried it as a dangerously unhealthy vegetable. And thereby hangs a tale concerning the linguistic root of the word spud, slang for potato.

Following the arrival of the potato, food fanatics in England, so the story goes, went so far as to establish special associations to warn and discourage the population from eating it. They called themselves the Society for the Prevention of Undesirable and Dangerous Species or, according to another tradition, the Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diets.

Too much of a mouthful to be remembered, those societies soon came to be referred to by their initials alone, as the SPUDS. It did not take long for the name to be identified with the potato itself.

According to some scholars, however, the real, linguistic root of the spud is the instrument used to dig it up. A short knife, generally employed as a weeding tool, was known as spudde. And out of it, slightly shortened, grew the (potato) spud.

This latter version probably also explains why people in the oil industry still talk of spudding in a well, as in drilling (digging) a well and striking oil, even though the multimillion-dollar oil-drilling rigs of today are a far cry from the humble weeding tool used to dig up potatoes.

The French, who are very fond of good food and take justifiable pride in their cuisine, say: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” – meaning, you can’t get something for nothing. It is nevertheless a fact that there is not a single egg in an omelette, linguistically speaking. All an omelette tells is its (supposed) shape. The chief ingredient of the omelette is lamella, for thin plate – the Latin diminutive of lamina.

An omelette therefore, if properly cooked, according to the rules of language should never be fluffy but thin as a blade. But one never knows how wrong one can go when things get heated. Gourmet chefs tend to get very upset if – horror of horrors – their omelette falls flat. If only they knew how true to the language their cooking is.

So what’s the origin of the word dessert, then? Again, it comes to us from France. In former days, once the main course had been served and eaten, the table was completely cleared, to make room for the sweets, and that is what the dessert, from the French desservier, says. It refers to the removal of all plates and dishes from the table.

I, for one, however, have an aversion to the word dessert. Even though its origin is French, it has always struck me as an Americanism. I prefer the traditional English word pudding. But if you were to ask for pudding in a restaurant in America, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. “Don’t you speak American?” they would say, rolling their eyes heavenwards.

On the subject of pudding, the lamington is a “dinkum” (honest) Australian cake. A square piece of sponge, coated with a soft chocolate icing and rolled in desiccated coconut, once it belonged to every garden party and church fete not only in Australia but also in England. Even so, its name has no connection with the English town of Lemington Spa. Even the spelling is different. Like Peach Melba and Melba Toast, it honours a person.

Historians tell us that Lamington was the titled name of the Scottish-born eighth Governor of Queensland, Australia. Appointed to the office in 1895 (when Australia was still a British colony), he assumed his duties the following year. It is said that he so endeared himself to the people that on his departure, they named their favourite cake after him.

The pineapple, on the other hand, got its name from its shape. Seeing the fruit in the Caribbean islands for the first time, 16th Century European travellers said it reminded them of a fir cone, known as pina in Spanish.

The word cup is much more poetic than it now sounds. From a Sanskrit root, it described a (little) well, though one of limited flow, it appears. Which may help to explain why Omar Khayyam wrote in his “Rubaiyat” (in Edward FitzGerald’s classic translation): “Ah, fill the cup, what boots it to repeat / How time is slipping underneath our feet? / Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, / Why fret about them if today be sweet?” Why, indeed?

First, there was brinkmanship with its devious diplomacy, calculated deceptions and sabre-rattling. Then, there was one-upmanship, the fine art of getting an advantage over others or showing that one is better than them without actually cheating. Then, along came gamesmanship with its attendant books, including one entitled “The Games People Play” explaining the intricacies of such favourite pastimes as power games, social games and business games.

The latest in this long line of fads is researchmanship. As the name implies, researchmanship has to do with the ins and outs of research – a key ingredient in achieving success in today’s high-tech business world.

The Americans are great ones for researchmanship. In the days when the US and the Soviet Union were feverishly competing with each other in the space race, the Americans spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research to develop a ballpoint pen that would write in the gravity-free environment of space, thereby allowing their astronauts to jot down notes while on space missions. The Russians spent no money on the problem. They solved it by giving their cosmonauts pencils with which to write.

In the 1990s, the US government gave a group of scientists a grant of a hundred million dollars to conduct research into the nature of complexity. Three years of research later, the scientists concluded that complexity (wait for it) is “essentially simple.” I suppose, next we’ll hear that the same group of scientists has been given another hundred million dollars by the US government to conduct research into the nature of simplicity and will eventually conclude that simplicity is essentially complex.

Like other fads, researchmanship has its own set of rules, laws and postulates. Here are some of them.

Bates Law of Research: Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they’re blind. Some people spend years going up alley after alley without ever discovering that all the alleys are dead-ends. Others spend their time trying to re-invent the wheel and tend to get very upset when they’re told that the wheel has already been invented. A lot of the research carried out in Pakistan tends to be of this sort. That’s why the wheel keeps being re-invented here.

Von Braun’s Credo: Research is what you’re doing when you don’t know what you’re doing. This school of thought, too, has a lot of adherents here. We are a people who are only too happy to go out of our way to show other people the way, even up to the point where we end up getting lost ourselves.

Westheimer’s Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. Public libraries in this country are now passé. The vast majority of people here don’t read books anymore, preferring to wait for the movie version. We’re in good company, however, because George W. Bush doesn’t read books either. By his own admission, he doesn’t even read newspapers. Condoleezza Rice reads them to him. Bush may be commander-in-chief of the US military, but it’s Condi who is reader-in-chief.

Land’s Lemma: When the experiment doesn’t work, distrust the experiment; when the experiment works, distrust the theory. One of the most popular theories in this part of the world is the conspiracy theory. The foreign-hand theory is also very popular here. Combining the two, you get the foreign-hand conspiracy theory – a sort of portmanteau theory that explains just about everything that goes wrong. England has its Flat Earth Society, whose members subscribe to the theory that the world is flat. We, in this country, however, subscribe to the theory that you can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard.

Thompson’s Theory: Any theory can be made to fit any fact by incorporating additional assumptions. That’s why it’s important to remember that when putting cheese in the mouse trap, always leave room for the mouse.

Horwood’s Sixth Law: If you have the right data, you have the wrong problem. So when you set about trying to solve a problem, it is very important to ensure that you select the right problem. Otherwise, you could end up barking up the wrong problem for years. As for Horwood’s five other laws, more about them on some other occasion.

Feyneman’s Law: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. An expert, of course, is somebody who knows more and more about less and less. Finally, he ends up knowing everything about nothing. That’s when he gets a job as a government consultant. Islamabad is full of such consultants, one more highly paid than the next.

First Rule of Applied Mathematics: Ninety-eight per cent of all statistics are made up. That’s why we have statistics like the one about the average Pakistani household consisting of 6.7 people. Has anybody ever met these 6.7 people? When a statistician was once asked in court whether he swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he replied, “I do – 66.66 per cent of the time.”

Gerrold’s Laws of Dynamics: (1) An object in motion will be headed in the wrong direction. (2) An object at rest will be in the wrong place. (3) The energy required to change either of these states will be more than you wish to expend, but not so much as to make the task totally impossible. The difficult takes time. The impossible takes a little longer.

Pugh’s Law: If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it. The story goes that a man once took a friend to a dinner party and kept introducing him to the other guests thus: “Meet my friend X, the well-known amateur brain-surgeon.” When Bush leaves the White House, he can always get a job as Professor of Amateur Brain-Surgery at the Bush Medical Research Institute in Crawford, Texas. And if there’s no such institute, they can always build one. Dick Cheney’s former employers, US oil services giant Halliburton, would probably be only too happy to put up the money. It’s the least they can do after all the billions of dollars in contracts that the Bush administration has awarded the company in Iraq.

McFee’s Maxim: Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be lost. That’s why nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Proof Techniques: (1) Proof by referral to non-existent authorities. (2) Reduction ad nauseam. (3) Proof by assignment. (4) Method of least astonishment (aka the non-eureka method). (5) Proof by handwaving. (6) Proof by intimidation. (7) Method of convergent irrelevancies. The proof technique you chose depends on the size of your research budget. It should be noted, however, that proof by referral to non-existent authorities is very popular in this country, where non-existent authorities are pretty thick on the ground. Then, of course, there is the term “competent authority” – a very well-known category of authority in bureaucratic circles in Islamabad, where nothing moves without the approval of the “competent authority.”

Dyer’s Law of Relativity: Not to be confused with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Dyer’s Law says life is short, but a three-hour movie is interminable. One such movie was 1959’s “Ben Hur”. Jerry Lewis said he only got to see half of Ben Hur because the kid sitting in front of him in the cinema grew up.

Thornley’s Law: What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos. Chaos Theory holds that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Philippines can cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. Work that one out if you can.

First Rule of Environmental Protection: The species is protected only after it is hopelessly depleted. Have you noticed, however, that people that talk about population planning have all already been born.

Second Rule of Environmental Protection: The most efficient way to dispose of toxic waste is to reclassify the waste as non-toxic. This is an invaluable rule for industrial polluters as it enables them to become environment-friendly companies without having to spend any money. There are many such industrial companies here, one more environment-friendly than the other. To cite only one example of what such companies can achieve with their environment-friendly policies, Karachi’s Lyari River now enjoys the dubious distinction of being the most polluted river in the world – having taken over the top spot from England’s Mersey River a few years ago. Some 200 million gallons a day of untreated, highly toxic sewage now flows into Karachi Harbour. This is yet another feather in the cap of our environmental protection agencies. If I had my way, however, I’d sack all the people working for these agencies.

Third Rule of Environmental Protection: Anything done to improve one area of the environment will cause corresponding damage in another area. This rule is also known as the Catalytic Convertor Principle.

Walder’s Observation: A mathematician is one who is willing to assume everything except responsibility. This observation applies equally to politicians and bureaucrats. Both of them are categories of people that run from responsibility as if it were some form of bubonic plague.

Albinak’s Algorithm: When graphing a function, the width of the line should be inversely proportional to the precision of the data. Thus, the more imprecise the data the wider should be the lines on the graph.

Perlis’s Postulate: The computing field is always in need of new cliches. On-line tech support is one such cliche. It is designed to provide everything short of actual help. That’s why there is no computer language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programmes.

Einstein on Math and Science: (1) Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. (2) If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut. (3) As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. Happy researchmanship, everybody.

Getting to these places from Karachi can involve several days of travel. This may be the reason why one sees so few Karachiites up there. But then, one doesn’t see very many Karachiites fishing off Charna Island either, suggesting that the vast majority of this city’s residents aren’t really into angling – which seems strange given the fact that Karachi is, after all, a city by the sea. Then again, maybe it isn’t so strange after all, considering that there are even some Karachiites who – incredible though it seems – have never seen the sea.

I have been a trout fisherman for more than fifty years. I caught my first trout in 1951, on a trip to the Kaghan Valley with a group of family members and friends. The group was led by my late uncle Major-General S. Shahid Hamid, the founder-president of the Pakistan Anglers Association. Above the door of the association’s office in Rawalpindi, he had had a sign fixed reading: “Headquarters for hunters, fishermen and all other liars”!

The reference to “liars”, of course, had to do with the fact that we anglers are well-known for spinning tall tales about the monster that got away. There are probably as many tall tales out there as there are anglers.

Over the years I’ve fished for trout in many places – for brown trout in the glacier-fed waters of Lake Saiful Muluk, for rainbow trout in the Scottish highlands, for steelhead trout on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan, for speckled rainbow trout in the wonderfully named Rogue River in Oregon.

In the summer of 1989 I was fishing one afternoon in the Rogue River, near the hamlet of Shady Cove, when I noticed that another angler – an elderly gentleman who was fishing about fifty yards downstream from me – had got his line badly snagged in some driftwood in the fast-running water.

Back in the 1950s, Old Khaliq, the electricity generator operator in Naran in the Kaghan Valley, and a fishing guide in his spare time, had taught me how to unsnag fouled lines. The trick, he said, was not to tug at the snagged line against the water’s current but to go downstream of the snag and work the line free from there. The technique often involved wading thigh-deep into the icy water in order to get into precisely the right alignment with the snagged line.

During my many trips to the Kaghan Valley over the years, I had become pretty adept at the technique. So when I saw that the Shady Cove angler had got his line snagged, I wandered across to him and offered to try to free his line. Old Khaliq had taught me well, and I was soon able to work the line free.

This got the Shady Cove angler and me to talking, shooting the breeze about this and that, as us anglers tend to do whenever we encounter a fellow member of the tribe.

The angler turned out to be a resident of Shady Cove, which back in those days had a population of 204, or 205 if you included the local cat.

“Do you know whose house that is?” asked the Shady Cove angler, pointing to a house a couple of hundred yards away.

“No,” I replied. “I’m from out of town.”

“That’s Miss Rogers’ house,” he said.

“Miss Rogers?” I asked.

“Yes, Miss Ginger Rogers,” he said..

“Ginger Rogers!” I exclaimed. “You mean THE Ginger Rogers?”

“Yeah,” he drawled, laconically.

Well, you could have bowled me over with a feather – Ginger Rogers, the screen legend, dancer extraordinaire, the star of such 1930s and ‘40s classic musicals as “Gold Diggers of 1933”, “The Barkleys of Broadway” and “Shall We Dance”…Ginger Rogers, the dazzling blonde goddess, living here in Shady Cove, of all places, in the middle of the Oregonian boondocks! To a movie fan like me, the thought was enough to make the head swim.

I was sorely tempted, then, to go and knock on her door and ask her for her autograph. In the end, though, I couldn’t muster up the courage.

Ginger Rogers died a few years ago, at the age of 90. When the news of her death came to Karachi over the wire, I remember wishing I hadn’t chickened out back then by the banks of the Rogue River in the summer of ’89 and had gone up to her house and got her autograph. That would have been something. Like many things in life, however, it was not to be.

The late American author Robert Traver – who lived in Upper Michigan – made several trips to Oregon to catch trout in the Rogue River. He was a man of varied talents. A practicing lawyer, he went on to become a judge. In between all his legal work, he somehow found time to write nine books, including two classic accounts about fishing, “Trout Magic” and “Trout Madness”, as well as a novel entitled “Anatomy of a Murder” (a small-town courtroom drama which was made into a critically acclaimed film in 1959 by Hollywood director Otto Preminger, with sterling performances from a top-flight cast that included James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, George C. Scott and Lee Remick in an Oscar-winning role).

I saw “Anatomy of a Murder” at the Palace Cinema in Karachi in 1960. Although the film had been censored in America for its use of sexually explicit medical terminology in a courtroom trial scene, it was shown in Karachi uncut.

“Trout Magic” (published in 1974) is a maverick look at trout fishing and its attendant tall tales, strange happenings, and all-around fishing lore. Traver recounts the story of a mysterious “dancing fly,” and speaks pointedly about “kiss-and-tell” fishermen. He even has some new angles on women anglers, and does a fine piece of tongue-in-cheek literary sleuthing into Ernest Hemingway’s famous fishing story “Big Two-Hearted River”.

Hemingway’s story first appeared in the “little” magazine “This Quarter” and soon after in one of his earliest books, first published in 1925 and called “In Our Time”. Since then the story has been widely reprinted in a procession of anthologies as well as endlessly dissected and explicated by what an awed beholder might call a whole new piscatorial school of academic writing inspired by the story – or should I say spawned?

Says Traver: “The story’s title comes from the name of an actual Upper Peninsula of Michigan trout stream called the Two Hearted River, the maps I’ve seen omitting the author’s Big and his hyphen between Two Hearted. Yet despite these small differences the connection between the story and the stream remains as obvious as it is undeniable.”

There’s enough trout magic in Traver’s book to rub off on every reader as the author weaves his storytelling spell. One of my favourite passages is “Testament of a Fisherman”.

“I fish because I love to,” Traver writes; “because I love the environment where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly; because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape; because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion; because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience; because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip; because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters…”

That, of course, was in the days before cell phones. Nowadays even trout waters are not free of the infernal instruments and their shrill beep-beeps.

The Bush administration’s original name for its invasion of Iraq was “Operation Iraqi Liberation”. But when White House officials realised that the acronym for the name spelt “OIL”, they hurriedly changed it to “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.

Not for nothing, however, is US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice known as the “Warrior Princess”. She was in her element this week, first telling journalists in Islamabad that she expects President Pervez Musharraf to fulfill his promise to hold free and fair elections next year, and then telling a press conference in Kabul on Wednesday that Washington would not allow Afghanistan’s “ruthless Taliban enemies” to succeed.

Rice said, “Afghanistan has determined enemies. They are ruthless, but they will not succeed…They are simply not going to win…We will not allow it to happen…We are not going to tire, we are not going g to leave. They should know that we are in this fight until it is victoriously concluded.”

Rice seems to have forgotten that this was also what the US said about its military intervention in Vietnam. For all its tough talk, however, the US had to make an ignominious exit from Vietnam, with Saigon falling to the Viet Cong even as the last US helicopter took off from the roof of the American embassy.

Rice also seems to have forgotten that when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, Moscow said its troops were not going to leave until the Mujahideen were vanquished.

Soviet troops were in Afghanistan for ten long years. They killed more than a million Afghans and destroyed most of the country’s infrastructure. All the killing and destruction availed them nothing in the end, and the Soviet-installed puppet Najibullah regime fell within two years of their departure.

Just how long does Washington intend its forces to stay in Afghanistan? Rice said the US is “in this fight until it is victoriously concluded”. But exactly how does Washington plan to determine when “victory” has been achieved? In the same way that President Bush concluded back in May 2003 that the “mission” in Iraq had been “accomplished”?

But Rice’s gung-ho rhetoric was totally over the top when she described embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai as one of the world’s “most respected leaders.”

Karzai is a former employee of the US oil company Unocal, which, back in the mid-1990s, wanted to build a gas pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan.

As for Rice’s remarks about Musharraf’s promise to hold free and fair elections in Pakistan next year, Foreign Office spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam told journalists in Islamabad on Wednesday. “On the democratic processes in Pakistan, we do not require advice from outside as these matters essentially concern the people of Pakistan.”

The British politician Lord Hailsham once remarked, “The moment politics becomes dull democracy is in danger.” Willie Whitelaw, the Tory leader in the House of Lords in the days of the Thatcher government, would have agreed with this formulation. He once accused the British Labour Party of “going around stirring up apathy”!

That’s also what many Pakistani politicians seem to spend much of their time doing: going around stirring up apathy – on the theory that the more apathy you stir up the more column inches your statements are likely to occupy in the press.

Then, of course, there was the late British novelist Kingsley Amis, who began his literary career in the 1950s as an angry young man and ended it some forty years later as an angry old misogynist. He said, “Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.”

Is this true? Well, yes, to the extent that the sophisticated tend not to be passionate about anything, and without passion there can’t really be any politics – at least, not in the classical sense.

The sophisticated also tend to see both sides of every question, a la: on the one hand, there is this, but then, on the other hand, there is that. This, again, is not fertile ground for politics, which requires that one be partisan, even blatantly partisan.

The story goes that a Palestinian negotiator once went to London for talks with the British Foreign Office. After a few days of discussions, however, he said he refused to talk any further until the British produced a one-armed negotiator.

“Why a one-armed negotiator?” asked the puzzled British officials.

“Because,” replied the Palestinian, “I’ve got fed up sitting here day after day listening to your officials saying, ‘On the one hand…but on the other hand…’”

Jerry Brown, a former governor of California, was once asked why he had entered the 1976 US presidential race. He replied, “Because I couldn’t think of a good reason not to. A little vagueness goes a long way in this business.”

Back in 1978, Jerry Brown said one other thing: “People will tear each other apart if given half a chance. Politics is a jungle and it’s getting worse. People want a dictator these days, a man on a white horse. They’re looking for a man on a white horse to ride in and tell them what to do. A politician can do anything as long as he manipulates the right symbols.”

In 1967, the American author Norman Mailer published a book called “Why Are We in Vietnam?” The title was an obvious attempt to cash in on the Vietnam War, which was at its height in those days. In fact, the book has nothing to do with Vietnam or the war. It’s actually about a bear hunt in Alaska.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney, too, is fond of hunting. Perhaps, one day we’ll see him writing a book called “Why Are We in Iraq?” The foreword to the book could be written by Condi Rice. She could begin by saying, “We are in Iraq for the duration. We are not going to tire. We are not going to leave. We are in this fight until it is victoriously concluded, or until the last Iraqi – whichever comes first.”

Murphy’s Law is now old hat. Now, we have Schnatterly’s Summing Up of the Corollaries, which says: Even if anything can’t go wrong, it will.

Schnatterly’s observation is particularly relevant in the context of Pakistani politics. Who in Pakistan could have thought on October 1, 1999 what would happen to Nawaz Sharif’s government only two weeks later?

It is another matter that Sharif had become so unpopular by then due to his bad governance and the victimisation of his political opponents that his government’s ouster was greeted with jubilation across the country.

Is it a mere coincidence that all these presidents were members of the Republican Party, aka the “Grand Old Party”? Or could it be that there is something about the GOP that makes it pick dodos as its nominees for president?

Be that as it may, there is no denying the fact that in George W. Bush, the world has been saddled with yet another Republican dodo as President of the United States. Not for nothing is Bush known as Dubya.

Last week, his job approval rating in opinion polls sank to a new low of 32 per cent, the worst of his presidency. His numbers are likely to sink even further in the wake of Thursday’s US Supreme Court ruling saying that Bush had overstepped his authority by planning to try Guantanamo Bay detainees by “military commissions” – trials marked by their lack of legal protections for defendants. Considered a sharp rebuke for Bush, the ruling is unlikely to do his plummeting popularity any good.

Bush’s tortuous syntax and woeful lack of knowledge of world geography, history, current affairs and a host of other topics have long made him the butt of jokes. But it goes beyond that. In a book titled “The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder”, American author Mark Crispin Miller argues that Bush may be the most illiterate president in US history. Bush thinks Africa is a country and was surprised to discover when he visited South America back in 2000 that “there are a lot of countries down there.”

As the “Dyslexicon” makes clear, Bush’s is not the merely technical illiteracy of most Americans, who, irrespective of their class or education, routinely make grammatical mistakes so slight that only pedants mind them. No, according to Miller, George W. Bush is so illiterate as to turn completely incoherent when he speaks without a script or unless he thinks his every statement through so carefully beforehand that the effort empties out his face. His eyes go blank as he consults the TelePromTer in his head, and he chews uneasily at the corner of his mouth, as if to keep his lips in motion for the utterances to follow, much as a baseball batter swings before the pitch. Thus prepared, he then meticulously sounds out every…single…word, as if asking for assistance in a foreign language.

Miller writes: “Of all his flaws, the president’s illiteracy is – or was – the one most noted by the (US) media. Governor Bush’s way with words (and logic, and books) got prominently covered in the months before Election Day 2000, although journalists eased off as time went on.”

Bush’s bite-sized gaffes were perfect for TV, which duly reported some of them, while Frank Bruni of the New York Times tracked his most flagrant boners.

“More influentially,” says Miller, “the televised concentration on Son of Bushspeak – George H. W. Bush having had a similar problem – extended quickly to the realm of late-night comedy, which is the surest way to the nation’s consciousness.”

Of course, the shtick on Bush was more gleeful, and far more insulting, than the tittering journalistic bits. Such reportage-cum-stand-up did the trick to some extent. Soon everybody knew that Bush could not pronounce ‘subliminal’, for example, along with a host of other words.

Bush’s lexical incapacity does not reflect one problem in particular but several kinds of verbal defect. As Gail Sheehy argued in a long piece published in The New Yorker magazine just before the election of November 2000, Bush may actually suffer from dyslexia. Surely that condition may explain his tendency to transpose words and to blurt out the opposite of what he means. It may also explain his frequent malapropisms: “hostile” for “hostage,” “arbitrary” for “arbitration,” “preserve” for “persevere,” “cufflink” for “handcuff,” etc.

A dyslexic president with his finger on the nuclear button is an unsettling thought, to say the least. “Hmm. I wonder whether this button says war or peace?” one can imagine Bush saying as he debates the pros and cons of unleashing Armageddon on an unsuspecting world.

Even dyslexia, however, would not account for Bush’s incessant violation of the fundamental rules of grammar (“The question is, how many hands have I shaked?”), his syntactic accidents (“It’s not the way America is all about”) or his utter prepositional confusion.

Nor – far more important – would dyslexia explain Bush’s thorough unfamiliarity with the system that he now purports to lead or his unawareness of the world beyond the US’s borders. To believe, for example, that Social Security is somehow not a US federal government programme, or that Africa is a country, displays a degree of ignorance unequalled, perhaps, in the history of the American presidency.

More than four years into his presidency, Bush jokes continue to do the rounds. Here’s one. It’s called “Even the CIA won’t tell you” and goes something like this:

George W. Bush was dismayed by the errors being made by the CIA and FBI. He called in Tom Ridge, the then-head of the Department of Homeland Security, and asked, “how come Israel knows things we don’t know? How come the Jews here in the US know things we don’t know?” Ridge called in Moe Katz, a Jewish undercover agent, who told Bush, “We have a code. We ask, ‘Vos titzach?’ …what’s happening?…and we share the information.”

Bush orders a disguise. He puts on a caftan and shtreimel, a beard with payees, and scuffed black shoes (traditional Jewish gear). They fly him in a stealth fighter to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and put him in an old, dented station wagon with an elderly Hassid Jewish driver. He is dropped off in Boro Park (in Brooklyn, New York) and approaches a man dressed as he is. “Vos titzach?” Bush asks. “Shhh,” the man replies, “George Bush is in Brooklyn.”

No Bush joke can match the real thing, however. Mangling the English language is one thing, mangling the map of the world quite another. Bush seems to be a master at both. Maybe that’s what he majored in at the Harvard Business School: Mangling 101.

Forget world geography, Bush is at sea even when it comes to the geography of his own country, as witnessed, for example, at a Republican Party rally in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 17, 2002, when he said: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.”

What are we to make of this gobbledygook? That Tennessee is not a state in its own right but is somehow a part of the State of Texas or what?. The mind boggles.

Then, of course, there is Bush on the subject of the Middle East. Talking to reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on August 13, 2001, about former Senator George Mitchell’s report on peace in the Middle East, Bush said: “There’s a lot of people in the Middle East who are desirous to get into the Mitchell process. And – but first things first. The – these terrorist acts, and, you know, the responses have got to end in order for us to get to the framework – the groundwork – not framework, the groundwork to discuss a framework for peace, to lay the – all right.”

As if all this were not bad enough, Bush added: “My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the – in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen.”

So if you’ve been wondering why the Middle East peace process hasn’t exactly been going anywhere fast since Bush took office, now you know.

And while we’re on the subject, just how, exactly, does Bush propose to explain to the rest of the world his description of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “a man of peace”? To call the Butcher of Sabra, Shatilla and Jenin a “man of peace” is like calling Attila the Hun a man of peace.

As for the US’s invasion and occupation of Iraq in flagrant violation of every canon of international law, is this Bush’s version of his administration doing everything it can to “stop the violence” in the Middle East?

Or could it be that he thinks Iraq isn’t in the Middle East? Maybe he thinks it’s somewhere out in the Far East – near North Korea perhaps. Maybe that’s why he lumped the two countries together in his infamous “Axis of Evil” speech.

Disposing of petitions filed by the Wattan Party and the Pakistan Steel Mills Peoples Workers Union challenging the privatization of PSM, the Supreme Court directed the government to refer the matter to the Council of Common Interests (CCI). It also directed the federal government to make the CCI functional within six weeks to finalise policy issues.

The Court said: “Conscious of the mandate of Articles 153 and 154 of the Constitution, we hold that the establishment and working of the Council of Common Interests is a cornerstone of the federal structure for the protection of the rights of the federating units. “Mindful that this important institution is not functioning presently, and taking note of the statement of Advocate Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, who is representing the federal government, that the process for making it functional is underway, we direct the federal government to do the needful expeditiously as far as possible but not later than six weeks.”

The Court said: “The approval for the privatisation of PSM by the CCI on May 29, 1997 continues to hold the field. In view of the developments that have taken place during the intervening period and the divergent stand taken by the counsel for the federal government that this approval was never recalled and the stand taken by the steel mills’ counsel that the matter of its privatization was dropped subsequently, it would be in order if the matter is referred to the CCI for consideration.”

In its short order issued after a four-week hearing of the petitions, the Court observed: “While exercising the power of judicial review, it is not the function of this Court, ordinarily, to interfere in the policy-making domain of the Executive, which in the instant case is relatable to the privatization of state-owned projects, as it has its own merits reflected in the economic indicators.”

However, the Court said in its ruling that in PSM’s case, the privatisation process had been “vitiated by legal violations by state functionaries, including acts of omission and commission.” It said that the government was giving “extra benefits to the successful bidders.”

The Court said the transaction had caused a loss of Rs 18 billion to the government. The order noted that the Privatisation Commission had extended extra benefits to the purchasers, including handing over Rs 10 billion worth of stock in trade in the PSM units to the purchasers and cash amounting to Rs 8.599 billion lying in PSM’s bank accounts – out of which post-dated cheques for about Rs 7.67 billion had already been issued to clear the liability of loans, which were due from the year 2013 to 2019. Also, a tax liability Rs 3 billion has already been paid, out of which Rs 1 billion would have been refunded to the purchaser on taking over the unit. .

Thus the total loss to the government on the transaction worked out to Rs 18 billion. Moreover, the government had accepted the liability to pay Rs 15 billion to PSM workers under the golden handshake scheme, the order said.

Given all this, the Supreme Court has done well to cancel the sale to the consortium comprising the Russian company Magnitogorsk, the Saudi company Al Tuwarqi and the Pakistani company Arif Habib Securities.

It is a historic judgment and one that will be welcomed by everybody who believes in transparency. All the members of the full bench are to be commended for their unanimous decision in this matter.

Four major problems continue to plague many developing nations: low levels of living; the problem of population growth; a lack of jobs; and a deteriorating plus inadequate infrastructure.

There is a huge per capita income gap between rich and poor nations. Switzerland, one of the world’s richest nations in GDP per capita terms, has over 400 times the per capita income of Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries. Japan’s GDP per capita, at $ 34,715, is 40 times higher than Pakistan’s, at $ 850 (the latest government figure).

True, the gap is considerably smaller when one adjusts these figures for purchasing power parity, or what a dollar will buy in the respective economies. Even then, however, the disparity in incomes is huge.

Moreover, the gap between rich and poor nations has been progressively widening. In 1939, the average American worker’s income was 16 times higher than the average Indian worker’s income. By 1969, it was 40 times higher. Today, it is nearly 78 times higher.

As co-authors Philip Kotler, Somkid Jatuspripitak and Suvit Maesincee observe in their study “The Marketing of Nations”, there is also a large and often widening gap between the rich and poor within individual nations. This income gap is generally greater in less developed nations than in industrial nations.

If we compare the share of national income that accrues to the poorest 40 per cent of the country’s population with that of the richest 20 per cent, we find that countries like Canada, Japan, South Korea and Sweden have relatively lesser inequalities. Others like Chile, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Libya and Tanzania have moderate inequalities. Yet others like Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Venezuela have drastic income inequality in their overall income distribution.

Apart from struggling with poverty, many people in developing nations fight a constant battle against malnutrition, disease and poor health. In 1999, the average number of doctors per 100,000 people was only 5 in the least developed countries compared with 220 in the industrial countries. Every year, about 20 million people die from infectious and parasitic diseases.

The infant mortality rate is 99 per 1,000 births in the least developed countries, compared with about 74 in developing countries and only 11 in industrial countries. Average life expectancy is about 52 years in the least developed countries compared with 61 years in developing nations and 75 years in industrial nations.

Malnutrition is another major problem in the poor countries. About one billion people in poor countries still do not get enough food. In terms of per capita daily protein consumption, it is 97 grams per day in the United States, compared with 63 grams per day in Brazil and 43 grams per day in Ghana.

Literacy levels in poor countries also remain low. Literacy rates in the less developed and developing countries average only 45 per cent and 64 per cent of the population, respectively, in contrast with 99 per cent for the industrial nations.

Most important is the interaction of all the above characteristics. They tend to reinforce and perpetuate the pervasive problems of poverty, ignorance and disease that restrict the lives of so many people in the poor countries.

In October 1999, the world population reached 6 billion, double the 1960 figure. The world population is projected to reach 7.2 billion in the year 2010, of which almost 5.9 billion will be living in poor countries.

The population of what comprises today’s Pakistan (the former West Pakistan) was only 37 million at the time of the first post-independence national census in 1951. Today, Pakistan’s population is an estimated 165 million, more than four times the 1951 figure. This very high rate of population growth lies at the heart of Pakistan’s economic problems.

As the authors of the “The Marketing of Nations” study note, the explosive birth rate found in many poor countries means that these nations have the burden of supporting millions of people younger than 15. In Pakistan, for example, 40 per cent of the population is under 15.

Today, millions of children in poor countries are working in farms, factories, workshops, street corners and garbage dumps. Enhancing educational opportunities is a way to make schooling a real alternative for these children. However, the immediate challenge is, how will the poor countries build enough schools? And some years later, how will these countries provide enough jobs for young people entering the job market?

As the authors of the study note, while the explosive population growth is the main problem facing poor nations, many industrial nations confront the opposite problem of stagnant or even negative population growth as well as an ageing population. The segment of the US population with the highest growth rate is 75 years old and above. Japan’s demographics make it the nation with the world’s oldest population.

Old people, like the very young, tend to consume resources and place higher demands on health and social services. Thus, for these “high-elderly-dependent” countries, how will the working population generate enough surpluses to support the retired population and the not-yet-of-age population?

As the authors of the study note, for the past decade, the French have had “1.9 children per family, well under the 2.1 figure considered necessary to prevent a substantive reduction in current population.” The French government has tried to stop the dramatic decline in the nation’s population growth rate by encouraging families to have more than two children. If the decline in the growth rate is not halted, France will become under-populated, under-productive, and top-heavy with senior citizens who will overtax the social security system.

Technology improves productivity but may reduce the number of jobs. The growth in GDP and unemployment in many countries indicates that employment has consistently lagged behind economic growth. This phenomenon, called “jobless growth”, is witnessed in both industrial and developing countries.

The authors of the study point out that between 1973 and 1987, employment in countries like France, Germany and the UK actually fell, even though they had fairly respectable growth rates. Three-quarters of the rise in output in these countries came from increases in total productivity, with the rest from increased capital investment – without creating new jobs.

The developing countries have also experienced jobless growth. The labour force in the developing countries continued to increase by 2.3 per cent throughout the 1990s, requiring an additional 260 million jobs. Women’s participation in the labour force also increased. And there was a steady migration of people to urban areas in search of work. These trends are likely to continue, with the rate of net migration expected to be about 4.6 per cent this year. Taking into account the number of people unemployed or underemployed, the total worldwide requirement for this decade (2000-2010) is projected at around one billion new jobs.

In Pakistan’s case, an estimated two million new jobseekers enter the job market each year. To create jobs in industry for all these jobseekers would be prohibitively expensive for a country of Pakistan’s means. At today’s prices, creating one job in the large-scale manufacturing sector in this country costs between Rs 300,000 to Rs 500,000, depending upon the type of industry.

It costs much less to create jobs in the agricultural sector, small- and medium-size manufacturing enterprises and the services sector. But even creating jobs in these sectors needs a framework of well-conceived economic policies and effective implementation of policies as well as continuity in policy – things that have often been lacking in Pakistan.

One says “a mere $ 362 million” because the 4,457 acres of land alone, which is part of the Steel Mills, is worth more than that at current prices. It seems fishy, to say the least, that the price of this land was not included in the Privatisation Commission’s evaluation of what PSM is worth.

On top of that, the Privatisation Commission was giving the buyers a bunch of extra benefits: including Rs 10 billion worth of stock in trade, and cash amounting to Rs 8.599 billion lying in PSM’s bank accounts (out of which post-dated cheques for about Rs 7.67 billion had already been issued to clear the liability of loans due from the year 2013 to 2019). Also, a tax liability of Rs 3 billion had already been paid, out of which Rs 1 billion would have been refunded to the buyers on their taking over the unit.

As if all this were not enough, the government had accepted the liability to pay PSM workers who were to be laid off Rs 15 billion under the golden handshake scheme.

When all these factors are taken into account, the government was losing Rs 34.59 billion in cash and kind and getting back only Rs 21.68 billion from the buyers as the sale price. Thus, the government was incurring a net loss of at least Rs 12.91 billion on the transaction. And this loss does not include the market value of 4,457 acres of land owned by PSM, which was being handed over to the buyers as part of the deal.

The amount of land owned by PSM is actually much more than 4,457 acres. Located at a distance of 40 km southeast of Karachi at Bin Qasim, PSM is spread over an area of 18,660 acres, including 10,390 acres for the main plant, 8,070 acres for the steel mills township, and 200 acres for a 110 million gallons capacity water reservoir. In addition, it has leasehold rights over an area of 7,520 acres for the quarries of limestone and dolomite in the Makli and Jhimpir areas of Thatta district.

In 1968, the Pakistan government decided that the Karachi Steel Project should be sponsored in the public sector, for which a separate corporation should be formed under the Companies Act. In pursuance of this decision, Pakistan Steel Mills Corporation Limited was incorporated as a private limited company to establish and operate steel mills at Karachi.

In January 1969, PSM concluded an agreement with V/o Tyaz promexport of the then Soviet Union for the preparation of a feasibility report for the establishment of a coastal-based integrated steel mill at Karachi. In January 1971, Pakistan and the then Soviet Union signed an agreement under which the latter agreed to provide technical and financial assistance for the construction of a coastal-based integrated steel mill at Karachi. The foundation stone of the project was laid on December 30, 1973 by the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Construction work on the mammoth project was carried out by a consortium of Pakistani construction companies under the overall supervision of Soviet experts.

PSM not only had to construct the main production units of the 1.1 million-tons-a-year-capacity steel mill, but also a host of infrastructure facilities. Component units of the steel mills numbering over 20, and each a big factory in its own right, were commissioned as they were completed between 1981 and 1985, with the coke oven and by-product plant coming on stream first and the galvanizing unit last.

The commissioning of blast furnace No. 1 on August 14, 1981 – Independence Day – marked Pakistan’s entry into the club of iron and steel producing nations. The project was completed at a capital cost of Rs 24.7 billion. The completion of the steel mills was formally launched on January 15, 1985 by the then President of Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq.

PSM has had a chequered history since its commissioning in 1985. There have been many ups and downs, which at times even threatened the very survival of the mills. At one stage, over-manning pushed up PSM’s employees-per-ton-of-capacity ratio to the highest for any steel mill in the world. Its per-ton-cost of steel produced was also one of the highest in the world.

Losses mounted over the years, until PSM reached a stage when it could not even pay the interest on its outstanding loans. The government had to bear the cost of servicing PSM’s loans. The problem was compounded by the fact that PSM’s product mix had been designed to produce 50 per cent steel billets for the re-rolling industry and 50 per cent other products to feed other downstream industries. But the latter were not set up until much later, forcing PSM in its early years to limit its production to billets and a few other products. This skewed product mix increased PSM’s production costs, adding to its financial woes.

In May 2000, the government approved the financial restructuring of the mills along with the downsizing of its manpower, and laying emphasis on the repair and maintenance of plants needing immediate attention.

As of June 30, 1999, PSM had accumulated long-term liabilities of Rs 19.117 billion in the form of loans owed to commercial banks, including a principal amount of Rs 11.35 billion and accrued interest of Rs 7.767 billion. In accordance with the government’s decision, these total long-term liabilities of Rs 19.117 billion were bifurcated into two financial facilities: financial facility No. 1 and financial facility No. 2.

The total principal amount of Rs 11.35 billion under financial facility No. 1 was to be paid in 12 equal annual installments at a markup rate equivalent to the average Treasury Bills rate in the preceding year plus 1.5 per cent for the first four years, 2.5 per cent for the second four years and 3.5 per cent for the last four years. The accrued markup amounting to Rs 7.767 billion under financial facility No. 2 was to be paid in 7 equal installments after loan No. 1 was fully repaid. The government was to pay the interest on this loan.

In accordance with this restructuring plan, PSM started making payments to the banks regularly and by June 30, 2002 it had paid the banks Rs 4.671 billion. However, in fiscal 2002-3, taking advantage of unprecedented sales and a record profit, PSM decided to pay the remaining principal amount in one go with the approval of the government. Accordingly, an amount of Rs 10.409 billion (Rs 9.458 billion loan plus Rs 0.951 billion markup) was paid to the banks on July 1, 2003.

In order to make PSM economically viable and to facilitate it in the repayment of outstanding loans, it was also decided to lay-off excess manpower, reducing it from 20,533 to 15,000. Accordingly, PSM introduced a voluntary retirement facility (VRF) scheme with effect from May 5, 2000. Under this scheme, the benefit of two additional basic monthly pays for each completed year of service along with normal retirement benefits was allowed.

As a result of this manpower restructuring, the number of PSM regular workers was reduced from 20,544 in 1998-99 to 13,371 as of June 30, 2003. Thereafter, the number was further reduced and now stands at 12,500 regular employees.

As part of the restructuring programme, it was also decided that PSM should undertake to carry out immediate capital repairs and spin-off its non-core activities.

The areas of repair and maintenance that had been neglected in the past were also given due attention. The major capital repairs that were carried out included the installation of boiler No. 2 in the steel making department, the second category capital repair of blast furnace No. 2 and the capital repair of two units of the oxygen plant along with their compressors.

The outsourcing on non-core activities, such as security, transport, medical care, education, etc., also yielded positive results, reducing the expenditure of these departments by 71 per cent.

In 2005, PSM broke all production records and made a net profit of Rs 6.5 billion. It made another Rs 3 billion profit in the first quarter if 2006. PSM is now a viable profit-making entity and is no longer a drain on the national exchequer. Given this fact, is there any need now to privatise PSM?

This is the question that the Council of Common Interests should address when it meets sometime during the six-week time frame given by the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, three cheers for the Supreme Court for handing down a ruling that will be welcomed by all those who believe in transparency.

The Indian government, for its part, says it aims to bring electricity to all rural areas by 2012 and has committed $ 3.1 billion for rural electrification. By contrast, rural electrification in Pakistan has now been extended to more than 90,000 villages (13,000 in the current fiscal year alone), and the Pakistan government says it plans to electrify all the remaining villages by the end of 2007.

On other fronts, too, India is in serious trouble. It has the world’s highest number of HIV infections: over four million infected people and 350,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2004. One in 50 pregnant women in urban areas tests positive and epidemic levels are reported among northern drug users. Some 350 million people in India live below the poverty line with a per capita income of less than a dollar a day. Another 500 million are not much better off, with a per capita income of less than two dollars a day.

India’s infrastructure is in shambles. Its roads are in an atrocious state. The antiquated railway network (which is one of the biggest in the world and carries over 13 million people to some 7,000 stations every day) is falling apart and horrific train accidents have become increasingly common.

Adequate housing is in chronic short supply and tens of millions of people in the cities sleep on the streets. Calcutta’s slums are the worst in the world for any major city, and even Bombay (India’s wealthiest city) increasingly resembles a huge slum. Hundreds of rivers and streams are choked with toxic waste.

India’s life expectancy, at 62 years, is lower than Pakistan’s, at 63, and India has one doctor per 2,165 people, as against one per 2,000 people in Pakistan.

For years, a severe fiscal crisis plagued Indian governments bedeviled by chronic and huge budget deficits. These deficits partly came from the bankruptcy of state-owned enterprises, ill-considered increases in social spending, and over-growth of the public sector. To sustain the deficits, successive Indian governments incurred heavy debt burdens. This forced them to cut back sharply on investment in both physical and social infrastructure. This, in turn, led to low wages and low employment rates, resulting in low consumption and poor motivation. These last two have resulted in low productivity.

Poor productivity, in turn, means poor profits, which, on the one hand, will discourage potential investors from investing more, and on the other hand, will affect the revenues received by the government. Diminished government revenues mean that only a slim budget can be assigned to build up India’s infrastructure.

It has been argued that, under global interdependence, the worst choice a country can make is autarchy (self-sufficiency). India lags behind in many key technologies because it opted for many years to do it itself. No country can make everything it needs; it must import the things that are better or cheaper from elsewhere. And it needs to pay for these imports with goods that it can export as a result of making these items cheaper or better.

Successive Indian governments have been proclaiming the promise of a strong Indian economy for years. “Strong and steady growth” has been the official mantra.

The trouble is that this growth has not made much of a dent in poverty. The often-cited figure of the emergence of an Indian middle class of 250 million people has been static for years. The question is, what about the other 850 million Indians? How long will it take them to emerge out of the swamp of poverty? Another 50 years? Another 100 years? Or what?

And India still lags far behind China in attracting foreign direct investment. FDI flows into India totaled $ 6 billion in 2005, versus $ 50 billion for China.

True, the Indian economy has been growing at the rate of over six per cent per annum in recent years. Even at this rate of growth, however, it will take decades to lift hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty.

In 1991, the then-Congress Party government (in which India’s current prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was finance minister), threatened with a balance-of-payments crunch, started the painful task of deregulating industry and stripping special interests of their privileges. The result was brisker growth and the flowering of the software industry.

But the reforms have proceeded in a halting manner, and never produced the 8 per cent-plus annual growth rates that India really needs to relieve grinding poverty. Enough reforms have gone through to inflict enormous pain on ordinary Indians. But not enough reform has occurred to give businesses and workers the flexibility and speed they need to make it.

India has lowered tariffs sufficiently to let cheap imports come in and compete for consumers’ hard-earned rupees against locally made goods. The result has been a host of bargains for shoppers, but devastation for local factories. Since 2000, China has been dumping goods from toys to chemicals into the Indian market at 60 per cent of local prices. Small businesses are being decimated. To cite only one example, in Navi Mumbai, an industrial suburb of Bombay, more than 1,000 factories have shut down.

In theory, the flood of cheap imports will force local businesses to restructure and get more efficient (that’s the same argument one hears in Pakistan). But these businesses are hobbled by high costs – and no reform laws have been passed to lower them. Indian businesses are hampered by tough labour laws and high water and power bills..

The big, bitter pill is labour reform. Laying-off workers is all but impossible. That puts off foreign investment and leaves Indian industry hamstrung when it comes to serious restructuring.

India’s industry is also manacled by other archaic laws. The excise tax is so complex and arcane that you need a Ph.D. to understand it. The process adds 5 per cent to industry costs and wastes time. Multiply such expenses by all the thousands of small businesses, and the capital lost is huge.

The Indian government has now awakened to the immediate dangers and is trying to stem the flood of cheap imports. But fundamental labour reform or a simplified tax code? No such breakthroughs are on the horizon.