Qamar uz-ZamanUpdated 16 Dec, 2020 12:53pm
Life was not as hard two years ago as it is today for Tariq Mahmood, a 39-year-old taxi driver in Islamabad. He works seven days a week for 12 hours a day but rarely has more than a few hundred rupees left after feeding his family.
Mahmood said he has not felt this dejected by his dwindling finances in the past 14 years. For cab drivers like him the real culprit is not Covid-19, which shut down businesses, or the advent of ride-sharing services, which siphoned off customers, but spiralling food prices.
“I cannot afford the education of my child after paying for food for the family,” Mahmood told
Experts see rising digitisation in age of Covid
Conference on ‘Sustainable Development in the Times of Covid-19’ discusses various aspects of pandemic impact
A digitised SME attracts the best available talent and digitisation also helps in retention of that talent. photo: file
ISLAMABAD:
Speakers and experts in diverse fields discuss different aspects of Covid-19 impact on Pakistan and its people, at the inaugural plenary of 4-day 23rd Sustainable Development Conference (SDC), highlighting that the silver lining in this grim scenario is the acceleration of digital transformation in all sectors of life.
The conference, titled ‘Sustainable Development in the Times of Covid-19’, was organised by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad on Monday. The event also included a penal discussion on social protection and a concurrent session on media’s role.
‘Criminals find loopholes to create layers for money laundering’
Islamabad
December 12, 2020
Islamabad : A webinar on ‘Anti-Money Laundering and Global Security’ was organised by Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies, here on Friday.
An international panel of experts from Pakistan and the United Kingdom were of the view that criminal entities had found loopholes in every industry to create layers for money laundering. Prof. Dr Nicholas Ryder, Professor of Financial Crime at UWE, Bristol, said that in order to make state as well as corporate compliance more robust, countries like the US and the EU need to coordinate and cooperate with countries from the South from where taxpayers money is illegally funnelled out. Shakeel Ahmad Ramay from the Sustainable Development Policy Institute stated that politics needed to be taken out of the fight against money laundering.
Privatizing Pakistan Steel
The writer heads the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.
The Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) corporation’s story presents classic case studies, both on why state-owned enterprises (SOE) fail, and why compromising transparency backfires in the privatization process of SOEs.
Pakistan Steel started its full commercial operation in 1984, eleven years after its foundation stone was laid. However, within 22 years – in 2006 (when it was operating on its optimum capacity for at least the last three years) – it was privatized to a consortium of foreign and local investors. The hasty process of privatization became controversial and the Supreme Court of Pakistan annulled its sale giving it back to public-sector management.