.. Prof Rahmat Karim Baig
Backward communities like ours have lately received the benefits of science and technology- long after a hundred years later than most nations of the world. In the mountain communities conditions of life have been hard and harder which was also common in Europe in the 16th century and the same natural problems had compelled them to think and improve their standard of life and so they worked on different disciplines and inventions were made, life became easier for them and competition began at various fronts to sell their machine made products and also to occupy markets for sale of their goods. This made the field clear to them that the quality of a commodity matters so they resorted to that aspect of the product and durability became a target. Feed backs were sought from users and this helped them to innovative and creative approach to design better articles.
Here in our country which had been taken from the unwilling hands of the Indian Congress party our political leadership faced certain defence, economic, political and other issues which kept them busy. Since the captain of their team had left them so they dwindled and missed the target which had been envisaged by Mr. Jinnah. That Phase of our history was the deplorable one and had its darkest image on the future of the country. Seeds of dissentions were sown and they soon fructified leading to the distrust between the two wings of the country. At that time the leadership was divided and did not focus on science, technology and industrialization which led to our backwardness, leading to a low period in economic activity where we had to go and ask for loans from different sources. The same leaders had forgotten the fact that only a decade ago – before the partition- the middle class Muslims of India had been in the tight grip of Hindu usurers- getting loans on high interest and failing to repay it on time which made it double within years, leading to surrender of lands and becoming at the mercy of Hindu Bania. This had happened before the eyes of our political leadership but they did forget the lesson soon after independence so they got loans on various interest rates and became inundated in the flood of debts and became unable to pay back the interest, let alone the capital.
All of this was due to shortsightedness and lack of wisdom. They did not focus on industrialization by building hydel power houses, relaxing rules for investors, increase in agricultural produce to be exported to occupy big markets and get hard currency. It was the lack of prudence of our leadership that has landed us into the marsh of a poor country with high population growth rate and poor agricultural products. We cannot feed the increasing number of our population nor can provide education facilities for them. We also cannot control population and have thus left millions of children in the streets for begging instead of giving them professional training according to market needs and utilize that great asset. .. Prof Rahmat Karim Baig, Chitral 08 Dec 2021