The story of industrialisation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) is the story of deceit, fraud and the resultant shameful failure.
The PTI government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa like its predecessors is mostly indulging in the rhetoric of creating an atmosphere of progress and prosperity in the province and not pondering over the causes of unemployment nor doing anything to create jobs in the province.
In the story of trickery played in the name of industrialising KP, the case of Gadoon Industrial Estate is the glaring example of manipulation by some industrialists to cash the facilities provided by governments for setting up plants there, and then illegally shifting the excise free imported machinery for the said industries to other provinces and importing excise free raw material for their Gadoon plants only to divert the same illegally to their plants elsewhere in the country.
The textile mills owned Anwar Saifullah in Gadoon, however, is a rare example of not going back on its commitments: The mills started with three hundred workers and is now thriving with over one thousand workers in the very same Gadoon blamed for not being industry friendly. For the owners of this mills, all the issues from electricity shortage to law and order did not matter and instead of packing and running away, they were able to expand their industry. If that textile mill could flourish, so can others the intentions are right.
Like the past governments, the PTI rulers are also talking of creating better health, education and corruption free environment. These are all good notions but to make dent in the worsening economic situation of the people of the province, the government has to do something to bring back the jobs lost because of the closure of over fourteen hundred industrial units out of a total of eighteen hundred factories and mills. It means sixty percent of the industrial workers previously employed are jobless. It also means that while it is the third largest, population-wise, province in the country, it can employ only a little over 7 percent workforce of the nation and even that when all its closed units start working. Right now the industry in KP is employing less than three percent of the nation's industrial workforce.
The basic need of the people of KP, most of whom are poor, is to feed their empty stomachs. Without jobs poverty cannot be reduced; the desired enrolment of children in schools cannot be achieved nor can the poor recover their strength if they are undernourished, no matter how much good medicine and medical advice they get from government hospitals. In the end, the people have to buy food with their own earned money.
The provincial government not only should work out a plan to open the over fourteen hundred shutdown plants but it must also devise ways to encourage setting up new industries in the province. The PTI government must set up a commission to bring back the industrial machinery or its equivalent in cash stolen from Gadoon by some industrialists. The case of the machinery taken from Gadoon is not very complicated. The industrialists were bond by law not to take their machinery from this estate unless the banks cleared it and gave No Objection Certificate (NOC). Bank records will show if the machinery was transported from here after getting NOCs.
If the PTI government is sincere, it will not be difficult to lure industrialists to this province: This province is surplus in electricity generation and it has natural gas more than it consumes. It also has vast resources of coal and other minerals waiting to be explored and exploited.
The first thing that the provincial government can do is to divert the net hydle profit and natural gas royalty it receives from the central government and use the amount to subsidize electricity and gas rates for all industries in the province.
This alone will offset all the disadvantages that this province is said to have when it comes to setting up industries here. The argument that industrialists are not ready to set up their plants in KP because of its distances from seaport is a false one. If industrialists can set up industries in Lahore and Faisalabad, some seven hundred miles away from Karachi without getting more benefits than they get in the port city, wouldn't they set up industries in KP only three hundred miles farther if they get substantial cuts in their power bills?
It is all about making the financiers and businesses feel welcome. No KP government has yet given importance to reviving the closed industries and setting up new ones to provide employment to the people of this province. The KP government also must realise that for every hundred thousand jobs that industry provides directly, it creates three times as many jobs downstream.
The PTI government should make Gadoon Amazai Industrial estate a test case for the revival of industry in the province. If it succeeds in Gadoon, more successes will be easier in the industrial sector in other parts of the province.
