The progress on the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project has become subject to controversy in recent days as a tense hearing of the Senate Standing Committee on Communication about the project has been followed by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government loudly voicing its concerns over the allegedly Punjab-centric nature of CPEC. During the Senate Committee hearing from earlier this week, the committee’s head, Senator Daud Khan Achakazi, sarcastically dubbed the CPEC the ‘China Punjab Economic Corridor’ while noting that most of the developmental work was currently focused on the eastern route of the project and the western route was being neglected. This statement was in response to the admission of the National Highway Authority (NHA) chairman Shahid Ashraf Tarrar that no budget had been allocated for the western route so far. The Senate committee accused Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif of inaugurating motorway projects and industrial zones in his own province of Punjab. In the same vein as this withering criticism, the Chief Minister (CM) of KP, Pervez Khattak, is up in arms about what he deems to be the deceitfulness of the federal government in reneging on its promises to the provincial governments when support for CPEC was being gathered. The CM held a meeting of close confidants where it was alleged that leaked documents from the Planning Commission showed that the promised western route that would connect Dera Ismail Khan to Mianwali to Bhuran was not even in the plans. This was interpreted as the federal government deliberately keeping the smaller provinces in the dark about the progress of the project, the allocation of resources and the involvement of China. Other notable facts presented during the meeting seemingly backed up the sentiment that Punjab was being disproportionately advantaged due to the expenditure on the CPEC while the less developed provinces were going to be ignored. For instance, 80 percent of the CPEC budget earmarked for the next three years was reserved for the highway projects inside Punjab. The meeting concluded with the stern resolution that federal government was ‘rigging’ the procedure. In response the KP government will start an ‘unprecedented’ protest campaign on all levels of government and would contemplate stopping the land acquisition process reserved for CPEC projects inside the province.
The history of Punjab dominating the politics of Pakistan is long and true, and the fears of the smaller provinces that the focus of the CPEC will be to maximise the benefits for Punjab are thus not unfounded given past experience. However, in this instance the uproar being raised is based on a misreading of the situation on the ground and the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government of KP is unnecessarily politicising this project in a continuity of its usual anti-PML-N rhetoric. The CPEC is a huge and complex project that will have to be developed in phases and the fact that the eastern route is being developed on a priority basis is a simple case of efficiency and expediency. The very fact that Punjab is more developed and already has a functioning network of roads and railways, which merely need to be modernised, points to why the work on CPEC has started there first. That is, to save both time and money. The already existing transport network connecting Karachi and Lahore, two of Pakistan’s biggest commercial centres, is in urgent need of modernising, so focus on that makes eminent sense. The western route, by contrast, will need to be built virtually from scratch and will therefore be more expensive and more time consuming. Thus it simply makes more sense for all parties involved to complete the easiest phase first and ensure that sections of the CPEC become functional and a basic structure to be built upon is in place as soon as possible. There is no malicious intent of the federal government evident anywhere and the east-west divide is imagined in this case. The CPEC will be completed after a period of years and work will commence on the western route in due course. Hence such premature assertions and the mantra of ‘rigging’ should be kept in check because it is not responsible to compromise the progress of the project simply because of inter-party bickering. The government for its part is however clearly failing at adequately conveying this message to the provincial governments. More needs to be done by the federal government to clear the air and remove the harmful cloud of misunderstandings surrounding the progress of the project. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/editorial/27-Nov-2015/cpec-concerns
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