FAISALABAD:Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (FCCI) President Dr. Khurram Tariq said on Friday futuristic, globally acknowledged and IT centric policies were imperative for expeditious and sustained economic growth of Pakistan.
Addressing participants in the 33rd senior management course of the National Institute of Management (NIM) Islamabad, he said that Pakistan had already missed many boats and the country must focus on probably the last chance to earn much needed economic sovereignty. He said that machine learning, cybersecurity, block chain and artificial intelligence should be our priorities as currently massive investments of $90bn have been made in this sector which may jump to 90trillion within the next few decades.
He said Pakistan’s share in this field is quite negligible, as it had failed to understand its growth potential in the coming years. He said the country was equipping its youth with obsolete subjects and technologies and it must prepare skill inventory for the next 10 years to survive in this sector. He said that Saudi Arabia was investing in this field in Pakistan and the it was believed that the country could earn additional $2bn as foreign remittances, “but we forget the massive dividends of this opportunity to earn $100bn from the expected exponential IT growth”.
He said the FCCI was the only chamber in Pakistan that had directly contributed to the budget formulation.
Responding to a question about R&D, Dr. Khurram Tariq said that the three buzzwords including R&D, innovation and entrepreneurship had inflicted colossal losses on intellectual growth and “we must evaluate our position in the global value chain and then carve out our future strategies”.
The FCCI president was critical of misgovernance and lack of competence and said that the government was responsible to expand the tax net, but it failed to do so. He said Pakistan was a haven for middlemen and 50 million population in Afghanistan was also part of country’s undocumented economy. He said the government proposed tax on retailers and hastily withdrew it. He said that if the government was serious in expanding the tax net, “we are ready to support it but the government must take solid initiative on its own”.
About subsidies to the textile sector, he refuted this notion and said that since 1994 the Government has been making capacity payments in the energy sector to the tune of 48pc only due to its misgovernance. He said the performance of FESCO and said that its recoveries are 99.2pc but consumers of Faisalabad were bearing the losses of other discos in the name of uniform tariff.