There is a particular cruelty in being destroyed slowly by people carrying briefcases. Pakistan was not broken by earthquakes or invasion. It was broken by plans, fancy, wordy, media-celebrated plans drafted in air-conditioned offices, approved in solemn meetings, and released to the press with the fanfare of a coronation.

The Public Sector Development Programme, by its own definition, is the government’s primary tool to fund national infrastructure, spur economic growth, bridge gaps, reduce poverty, and build human capital where private investment cannot reach. It was, in other words, the sacred instrument of national salvation. And it was squandered, year after year, project after ghost project, until the nation that built Tarbela Dam and Mangla Dam found itself unable to pay its electricity bill without begging from Beijing and Washington in the same breath.

Let us speak plainly about what was done. In 2014, the National Economic Council approved a Public Sector Development Programme of 11.57 billion dollars at the exchange rate of that day, 101.55 rupees to the dollar. Eleven and a half billion dollars. Had that money been placed in the hands of the engineers who built the Indus Basin projects, men who completed Mangla and Tarbela in record time, under budget, to standards that still hold decades later, Pakistan today would be an exporting, solvent, industrialising nation. Instead, it was handed to a planning machinery that had already calcified into a Soviet-style rubber stamp, approving whatever ministries and line departments submitted, rarely subjecting a single project to genuine technical or financial scrutiny.

“The Neelum–Jhelum hydropower project was estimated at 15.3 billion rupees in 1989. It was completed at 508 billion rupees. This is not an anomaly. This is the system working exactly as designed, by those who profit from delay, revision, and cost overrun.”

Among the most catastrophic decisions embedded in those glossy annual plans was the wholehearted endorsement of imported liquefied natural gas-fired power plants and imported coal-based power plants. Read the Annual Plan 2014–15 carefully, and you will find both recommended with........

© The Friday Times