Knowledge is Power-II Scientific Mind Set
Universities in Pakistan have failed to nurture scientific mindset amongst students. Students are only concerned with grades and passing the course. Teachers fail to inspire students to do research, innovate and create something out of the box through practical experiments.
Therefore, every year thousands of individuals graduate but the quality of human resource is low. Our governments have failed to give due importance to knowledge, research and education. According to Mr. Miftah Ismail former finance minister, while we were busy in changing prime ministers during first 11 years of our independence, India established 5 Institutes of Technology within first 10 years. The consequence is that Pakistan hardly produces anything, it mostly imports. This can be linked to various economic crisis that the country faced including the current one where we are facing problem of shortage of foreign reserves. Our exports are low and imports are high and in order to control trade and current account deficits, government has imposed import controls. If our exports would have been high, this problem would not have arisen.
Information Technology (IT) has huge potential. But even here due to the declining standards of our graduates, we are unable to get high value IT business. In contrast, India has become the hub of technology. While, our official IT exports are around USD 2–3 Billion, India’s IT exports are around USD 156.7 billion. In terms of population, India has a population advantage of around 6 times but in terms of IT exports the advantage is around 78.35 times.
This means that equivalent to population difference between the two countries, our IT exports should have been around USD 26 billion. Thus, by looking at the numbers, it is easy to see how far behind we stand. The state of Pakistan must focus on education and pursuit of scientific knowledge and instilling scientific mindset amongst the students, instead of focusing on creating housing societies or encouraging creation of monopolies by providing protection to few companies. The existing resource allocation results in super rents provided to few elite classes and unequal distribution of resources.
The current status quo needs overhauling and this can only be done by disrupting the state of affairs and adopting people and knowledge centric approach. This is only possible via fair taxation system and equitable allocation of resources. If we do not learn lessons from the existing crisis the rot will continue until it becomes unsustainable.
