The Road Less Travelled By
Pakistan is on the verge of a revolutionary transition where everything requires a drastic overhaul. The entire system of more than 50 years has become stale and rotten. Many institutions have become outdated and irrelevant when viewed through the lens of this ever-changing, ever-evolving world. Our strategies for educational reforms, health sector improvement, gender equality and online safety have proved to be obsolete. As a small exercise, let us investigate how many scientists the Ministry of Science and Technology has produced or how many scientific inventions it has made during the last 10–15 years. After Dr Abdus Salam’s Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, there has been only one scientific software invention, named BRAIN, developed by Basit and Amjad Alvi in Lahore in 1986.There are 284 universities affiliated with the HEC, and out of these, only 18 universities feature in the QS World University Rankings, with only 1 per cent of our GDP being spent on the education sector. The reasons remain the same: corruption, low faculty salaries, substandard infrastructure, outdated curricula and, last but not least, political instability.According to JCI (Joint Commission International) and WHO, only three hospitals in Pakistan have been accredited. The rest remain far below international standards because of underfunding, urban-rural gaps, workforce........
