Should we be proud of what these guys did? Or ashamed of it?
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Prof. Muhammad Hamid Zaman and Dr. Afreen Siddiqi
Pakistan’s flood of 2010 was the largest in the country’s history. We still haven’t recovered from the incredible destruction of life, property and infrastructure that it left in its wake. No one can argue that if such a calamity were to occur year after year, the existence of the country would be in jeopardy. The economic impact of a 2010 like flood year after year is no different than the long-term consequence of illiteracy in Pakistan!
This evaluation and other mind-numbing statistics were made public earlier this week by the Pakistan Education Task Force. You can find the report here. According to the report, ten percent of all the children in the world, who are not in any school, live in Pakistan. This places Pakistan second on the list of “out-of-school” children in the world. The number of children not in school in Pakistan is around seven million, which is roughly the entire population of Lahore. The numbers are even worse for adults, particularly women in rural areas, where less than a third of the female population has ever attended any school.
Our annual spending on education, which should be at least upwards of 4%, has gone down to 1.5% of our GDP. Perhaps a more shocking fact is that this amount is less than the subsidy given to PIA alone.
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Every year, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) puts out a very beautiful calendar on bridges all over the world. However there has never been any bridge from Pakistan on this calendar. There is not without reason. In the last six decades, Pakistan has not built a bridge of any aesthetic or architectural value.
Most of the new major bridges are of the economic variety built for the roads out of pre-cast concrete boxes or beams, or of plate girders that any one hardly notices driving over. Also since rivers are not used for navigation like they are in industrialized countries, the bridge spans are not very large or high. Therefore there is no need of high super structures like one sees in the case of Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco or other structures like that all over the world.
Other than rail and road bridges, Pakistan also has numerous dams and barrages over major rivers. These are river blockage structures and gated spillways to control water flow and are often used for road traffic as well.
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