ISLAMABAD: Secretariat of the all-important China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is considered a game changer for Pakistan and also otherwise tops the list of government’s priorities, is facing severe shortage of human resource and expertise. Not only that there is no project director for CPEC for the last several months but it is also short of experts and specialists needed to provide required secretariat support. Presently, the CPEC project wing in the Planning Commission…
Posts published in “Day: April 13, 2017”
By Salman Siddiqui in The Express Tribune, April 13th, 2017. KARACHI: China has approved additional financing for infrastructure projects in Pakistan under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), taking the investment volume to $62 billion from $55 billion, announced Sindh Governor Mohammad Zubair on Wednesday. “New investment has been approved for projects in various sectors including [establishment of] industrial zones,” said Zubair while speaking at a conference on “Infrastructure demand and financing” organised by credit rating…
As recently as October of last year, Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves stood at an all-time record high of $24 billion. Since then, however, a combination of the rapidly increasing international price of oil and an uptick in our import bill have caused our reserves to plunge, with the State Bank of Pakistan now holding at $16.5 billion with another $5 billion held by commercial banks. In response, the SBP is now borrowing dollars from local…
This article is the final part of the ‘Before CPEC’ series by the writer: published on March 28, 2017 and April 3, 2017.Poet Muhammad Iqbal visited Spain and prayed in the old mosque of Cordoba in 1933 where he wrote his famous poem ‘Majid-e-Qartaba’. Gen Ziaul Haq visited Kashghar in 1984. He requested the local Chinese authorities to unlock the big Friday Mosque in the city – it had been sealed for a long time…
By Shezad Baloch in The Express Tribune, April 13th, 2017. (The writer is a research student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication) It is hard to imagine going without clean drinking water for 15 to 20 days consecutively, but for the citizens of Gwadar, it is a fact of life. Residents of this coastal city get clean drinking water for just one hour, every two to three weeks. For poor…