Since 90s Pakistan witnessed flood of Plans, Visions, Development Frameworks and Reform agendas by multilaterals, planning ministry, think tanks and economic intellectuals.

Uraan Pakistan is the latest addition as the 13th Plan for 2025-2029. In technical terms, all plans and reform agendas are meant to be a blueprint for development under ‘constrained optimization’.

Unfortunately, the absence of an explicit recognition of constraints and optimizing the targets within them has led to half-hearted attempts and in most cases are the reasons for their failure and/or under-performance of the above exercises.

Devoid of ‘constrained optimization’ specifically ‘time’ constraint, they can be likened to fairy tale planning and/or a ‘pie in the sky’ exercise.

Planning 101 lists the following conventional constraints whose explicit recognition are usually the bases for ‘effective’ planning: (a) Time, Resources, Geographical, Regulatory and Financial. In case of Pakistan let us add a few more ‘imbedded societal/communal structural’ constraints that are likely to persist for the next few decades and defy consensus in the medium term; (b) Demographic (explosive population growth and rapid urbanization), cultural (e.g., low female labour participation rate in formal manufacturing sectors), outflow of manpower, divisiveness in society at various levels, (religion, linguistic, regional, tribal, political/economic ideology), colonial mindset and elitism.

In the past decade; (c) climate change and geopolitical landscape are the new entrants to the above list of constraints, which are difficult if not impossible to be resolved in the medium term. While some may give higher weightage to the explicit political/economic divisiveness, e.g., public vs private sector led development, import substitution vs export led growth, social vs economic indicators, democracy vs autocracy and opting for fast rapid short-term vs steady long-term sustainable growth for their role in past failures, but the........

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