Time for action
The rumours about suspect causes of destruction of the records of the Metro Rail and Nandipur projects, and disappearance of taxpayers' records from FBR's office in Faisalabad, will further strengthen…
Saarc – what it must focus on
While addressing the concluding session of the 8th meeting of the Finance Ministers of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) Pakistan's Finance Minister referred to the trade-limiting policies of…
Focus on hydropower
A draft policy for the development of mega hydropower projects in Pakistan was rolled out last week. It is a significant initiative to harness hydropower as the main source of…
Politics of last week
Two important events took place this week past. First the Prime Minister addressed the nation, an address that was delayed because in the Prime Minister's words the scale of problems…
The Arab winter as ‘morbid symptom’
The title of Gilbert Achcar’s latest book ‘Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising’ (2016) is derived from Gramsci’s ‘Prison Notebooks’: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the…
Does analysis mean dumbing down?
There are two broad-brush conventional opinions about knowledge and philosophy in Pakistan. One estimates that the majority of Pakistanis are ‘jaahil’ or semi-educated and that they are too literal, read…
2015: the year of ‘accountant’
I declare 2015 the Year of the Accountant. All stakeholders including politicians, members of the establishment, and the economic team were engaged in balancing their books with some distinctions: the…
From 9/11 to 9/11
The devastating terrorist attacks in Paris which killed 129 people and injured over 300, and the subsequent response it prompted from the West, can have far-reaching geopolitical implications in Europe,…
A tale of two Budgets – II
This is the second of a two-part series of articles on the Indian budget and comparisons with Pakistani budgets. Part-one focused on revenue generation while part-II will focus on expenditure…
Return of TDPs
The global handling of security challenges is causing immense secondary problems related to the mass migration of populations from war zones to countries at peace such as those in the…
