I'm an Economist. I've worked very hard for years,
dreaming of coming to Pakistan
helping the Pakistani economy grow.
A subject that has been discussed very effectively today.
Recently, I've been given my wish
I'm now in the government, helping plan the economy
And therefore, I have this Chinese curse up there.
This Chinese curse that says, "May you get what you wish for"
I seem to have gotten what I wished for.
So the title of my talk is "Growing Pakistan".
You've had all kinds of ideas today on how to grow Pakistan
What you wish me to do
This is what I've been thinking about.
This is what I want to share with TEDx today
Let me begin with what I am faced with
I see before me, a strategy that everybody's running
There are three prongs to our strategy right now
Three things that we are talking about
We think projects.
We think development is a set of projects.
We think that we should build bridges, roads
energy projects, railroads, dams etc.
We need more projects - that's what we do.
We have a mindset and a culture of seeking projects.
But then we need a lot of money
Where do we get a lot of money from?
We have to go outside looking for money from donors.
We're looking for aid, as you might have noticed.
Every headline that we get from our leaders is
"We've signed an aid memorandum"
"We've got some more aid."
"We inaugurated a new project."
We're always looking for aid
Always looking for new projects
That is what we are faced with
That's our first rung of development strategy.
The second thing that we're always trying to do is
achieve mass production
I'd talk to any of you
If I asked you questions everybody would say
"We should have more industry"
"We should have more agriculture"
'We should make more products."
What kind of products? Make more t-shirts, make more shorts
Make more trousers. Sell them overseas.
Textiles.
At the same time, grow more mangoes, more crops - sell them outside
We're in a mode of producing mass-produced goods.
We are still thinking in terms of Model T Fords and in terms of production lines
We give a lot of subsidy to our industry
We have clever schemes for growth
I hear all kinds of clever schemes
Plant this tree and we'll get all kinds of energy
Dig this hole in the ground and we'll find water
that will take us through the future.
So we've all kinds of clever schemes
But the thrust is mass exports and the thrust is development projects.
The third rung to our strategy is
Starve domestic consumption.
Our domestic consumer must not be able to buy luxury goods
Must not be able to buy consumer goods.
Therefore, we have a program of import substitution
We manufacture cars locally
We protect them very heavily
at the cost of domestic consumer.
We protect our engineering goods, again, at the cost of domestic consumer.
We stifle retail.
If you go outside shopping, you won't find some good shopping malls.
You won't find any good things.
We feel the only use for people is if they are producers - they're not consumers.
So we have
A growth paradigm
If you want to grow Pakistan - we only think growth in terms of
growing them as producers.
Growing them in terms of building infrastructure and projects.
Now that's a very interesting paradigm.
Pakistan has not grown very rapidly.
Pakistan is not an East Asian Tiger
Pakistan is not an Elephant or a Dragon
Pakistan does not grow very fast.
It grows sporadicly, it grows for 5..6..7 years
Then we have a recession - we come down very rapidly.
Our poverty numbers don't seem to improve.
What should we do?
Our planning paradigm - these three ideas that I gave you
Aid funded donor projects, mass production and starve the consumer.
These three ideas have not delivered development for us.
We are still trying to push development
With this narrative, of these three ideas
Push industry and production and starve the consumer.
There are some innocent by-products of this paradigm
Where do we get ideas for products?
Our ideas for products
Mainly come from watching overseas
We see a nice highway overseas
We see some nice project overseas
People are doing IT - we should also start doing IT.
Donors are asked by us to design our projects
so we have in a sense, outsourced our own thinking.
We are not generating our own thoughts
We are outsourcing our thinking.
Meanwhile, what is the government doing?
Because we've outsourced our thinking - government has become transactional.
What does that mean?
Government is thinking only of projects - going from project to project.
And not really thinking of conceptual things.
So policy, now, has become a series of projects and we have to be careful of that.
What is happening as a result?
We are becoming very good mimics.
We are mimicking what the West has done.
We are doing everything that the West has done.
If they've built something - they build social protection
They build model villages
They build some kind of a new system for watching cities or whatever
We try and copy that
What is wrong with all this?
The fact is that we can not innovate if we mimic.
We are only mimicking - we need to innovate
How do we do that?
Okay, very briefly; this is our development discourse.
Our development discourse is
Build projects
Develop mass production
Starve the consumer
Follow the donor
Mimic the donor
This is our discourse. Now why is discourse important?
Discourse is important because discourse sets the framework in which we think
Discourse is a framework within which we operate
It is the narrative that all of us are following
That narrative is projects, aid and mimic.
Now, there are some unintended consequences of this discourse and this is very important to follow.
Unintended consequences are what are holding us back.
First, government agents, because they've ceased to think
Are now, not able to produce the quality that is required for good governance
And we're all frustrated with that.
We have solutions that we follow from outside
We copy from outside
All we need is implementation
Yet, the implementation structure remains what we had a 100 years ago.
We have not reformed that.
The incentive structure of the implementation system
Is such that the poor bureaucrat was implementing
is cash poor perk rich that has its own problems
All projects, come with their own perks
therefore, all the bureaucrats are invested in projects.
So we have a system where projects get reinforced because people get perks from their projects.
The second, unintended consequence of this paradigm - of this form of thinking - is
What I call a 'premature overload'.
What does a premature overload mean?
Pakistan has a per capita income of a $1000.
If you think about it, where does that place us?
The US had a per capita income of a $1000, well before
the Civil War.
So we are at the level of development
Where the US was before the Civil War.
Yet, what is expected of us
By the world, by the donors is
far more.
They want us to build roads
They want us to build social protection
They want us to build policies for the poor
They want us to build all kinds of new things.
A complete welfare state.
In the premature overload, we need to build highways.
Whereas all that is required is a two-lane road.
So we are building highways everywhere
Rather than worry about building the infrastructure that we need for today
This is the kind of infrastructure that is given to one class of society
Another form of infrastructure is the highways that we have.
The premature overload leads us to build welfare systems for tomorrow
To build suburbia for the rich
But we do this with the government organization of yesterday.
In order to make these premature overload projects we're creating parallel systems of government.
The third unintended consequence of the development paradigm that we have is
that we've got cities that are barren of creativity.
How are they barren of creativity?
Once we've made up our mind that we want industry only
We don't want any domestic commerce
We don't want any domestic entertainment infrastructure
We follow the Islamabad - DHA paradigm
Where what we are trying to do is
Build these suburban cities with no domestic retail infrastructure
Entertainment infrastructure or mixed infrastructure
There is no public space in these cities
There is no space for the poor
There is no creative space in these cities.
This is our paradigm for development
We want four-lane Highways, we want fly-overs, we want everything
We don't want to cater to this.
And that is a planning paradigm that we need to change.
We also have a force intended consequence of our planning paradigm
Which is exclusion.
We've got lovely suburban cities that are set full of golf-courses
things your family houses
elite spacious spaces
and indeed, a lot of religious infrastructure.
But we have no community space
And we have no playgrounds for the poor.
And that is leading to social tensions as I pointed out earlier too.
The fifth important consequence is, we have no intellectual space or space for innovation left
Why? Because we're mimicking constantly
We are mimicking the West, we are trying to get ideas from the West
and trying to implement them very fast - so that mimicry is leading to
a lack of domestic thought leadership.
And we have, as a result, got a very dated discourse of development.
The sixth important consequence of the way we are doing things now is
We have no success norm.
Our success norm now is no longer meritocratic
We are not thinking in terms of people coming up on merit.
People come up because of government licences
Because they are good consultants or because they have some form of relationship power.
Not that they have competed, innovated
Developed new ideas, developed new thought
The paradigm is follow the donor.
We have a rent-seeking paradigm
What is all this leading to?
We have a follow-the-donor mimic type approach
We have developed these structures where we have
All these unintended consequences that I pointed out.
Where is this leading us to?
As I said, growth is not taking off
We are not becoming an Asian Tiger
We are not becoming an Elephant
We are not becoming a Dragon - which is referring to China
We are also seeing, a deep sense of frustration in our people
If you look at the survey, people are deeply frustrated and unhappy
And we see this in all kinds of indicators again and again.
You have all kinds of indicators in the world which point out how difficult things are.
I would like to overlay on this the narrative of the dispossessed youth.
If you think about it, 80 - 90 million kids, which is 50 per cent of our population
Are under the age of twenty.
These children have little education
Little hope
But more importantly, they have little space
They have little space in our cities.
They have little space for their community
They have no libraries, no community centers
no play grounds
Yet, we have a number of golf courses
Yet, we have all the space in the DHA.
What does that mean?
These kids are not being socialized.
As Wellington said, "The Battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton."
Where are our playing fields?
Where is our community space?
That allows these kids to be socialized and modernized and interfaced with the globe.
Even more importantly, they have no intellectual leadership
Because we are busy mimicking
We are not innovating
So they have no intellectual leadership
Except one
They have community space and they have leadership - where?
It's in the mosque.
And that is something we should all think about.
So, I come back to my planning problem or my growth problem
When thinking about growth
I've just outlined to you where we stand in terms of our thinking
In terms of our thinking growth and development.
We were thinking of growing Pakistan - we were thinking of growing Pakistan economically
By building projects, by producing industry
By starving the consumer
But we have several unintended consequences that show
That while we were growing Pakistan economically
We retarded the community
We retarded our ability to innovate
We retarded our ability to think
Those things are coming back to haunt us
So what should be my task?
My task is, the way I look at it, and correct me if I'm wrong
My task is to change the discourse.
How do I change the discourse?
What I've been talking about is we've had a very hardware approach to development.
Our development was building projects, building industry, building this - everything was hardware
Everything was growing in one direction only.
So, when I said growing Pakistan
We were growing Pakistan only economically, retarding Pakistan intellectually
and community-wise.
Now we have to think differently - what I call the software of development.
We've done the hardware and not succeeded.
What is the software?
Software is, let's think productivity
Let's think how productive we are in terms of our asset usage
In terms of our human capital usage
Let's think of how productive we are with knowledge
How do we use global knowledge
How do we use our knowledge.
Let's define a new success norm
which is innovation, entrepreneurship - not rent-seeking
not running after the government or the donors.
Let's develop this new software
which requires tolerance and an acceptance of modernity.
And truly there is no development without acceptance of tolerance and modernity.
Let's accept that.
And let's accept that our cities must be a space for creativity.
They are not just an upside down suburbia.
They're a place for creativity
Let's create the necessary city centers and things to allow creativity to happen.
So, how will growth and development happen?
Growth and development will happen
Once we allow ideas and knowledge to happen
Once we allow modern discourse to happen
Once we begin to search for innovation and creativity
This is my new task the way I look at it
And you can tell me if you think that I'm not on the right track
And this is why I would add
Why I decided to sponsor TED
Because TED is all about modernity,