Destitute woman sorting plastic waste on a Karachi street.
Laws to control pollution in Pakistan exist, but are hardly enforced. Chemical health hazards abound.
The South Asian country faces numerous adverse impacts of chemical pollution as its industrial activity and consumer market surge. Negative impacts affect air, water and soil. Especially the localities where poor people live are exposed.
Sometimes the impacts are in plain sight. An accident killed at least 14 people in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, in February 2020. Dozens who survived were admitted to local hospitals. Because of the chemically polluted air, they suffered chest pain, burning eyes and breathing difficulties. The neighbourhood concerned was Keamari, which is close to the South Asian nation’s major commercial port.
Rice exports need more than lip service
GI tag alone cannot help boost earnings; Pakistan also needs to fetch better prices KARACHI:
Banks’ lending to rice processing mills more than doubled to Rs57 billion in Jul-Dec 2020 from Rs26.5 billion in Jul-Dec 2019, according to the latest statistics released by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).
However, this huge growth in lending to rice millers came in the form of restructuring of old loans under the special financial stimulus package announced by the SBP in March 2020 to mitigate the economic fallout of Covid-19 pandemic.
That’s why despite this massive lending – and that too at low interest rates – rice exports did not rise. In fact, Pakistan exported a little below 1.825 million tonnes of Basmati and non-Basmati rice in Jul-Dec 2020, against exports of 2.083 million tonnes in the same period of 2019, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).
Sindh is considered a haven for wind energy, with perfect wind conditions, primarily in Thatta. AFP/File
ABOUT seven kilometres from the Bholari turning point on left side of the Karachi-Hyderabad Motorway (M9), an uneven path leads to a barren land the site of many windmill towers. From M9 I could barely make out the huge windmill towers, or wind turbine towers.
As I reached the site I found some Chinese workers working. Each windmill tower having three long blades was approximately 100 metres high. The blades on the towers were rotating very slowly due to low wind pressure.
This is one of the 10 wind energy projects undertaken by independent power producers (IPPs) in Sindh’s Jamshoro district. These projects are currently passing through various phases of execution. Sindh Energy Minister Imtiaz Sheikh, however, says they have been facing delays.
Given the state of the country, and the amount of chaos that runs through it, we wonder if any government would be able to solve the problems that are faced without a long, consistent policy in.
A year of unprecedented loss
Services sector records negative growth of 0.6% for first time since 1960s
Year 2020 had been like no other year, especially in terms of digital transformation witnessed in Pakistan. PHOTO: REUTERS
Growth in much of the world’s services sector was anaemic in 2020 as industries were worried about the economic destruction caused by the Covid-19 pandemic across the globe.
In Pakistan, one of the most hard-hit areas was the services sector, which for the first time since the 1960s recorded a contraction of 0.6% from July 2019 to March 2020, revealed the Economic Survey of Pakistan 2019-20.
Terming services a supporting sector for the economy, senior economist Dr Ashfaque Hasan Khan said the negative growth came on the back of dismal performance of the manufacturing and agriculture sectors.