There is a particular cruelty in being destroyed slowly by people carrying briefcases. Pakistan was not broken by earthquakes or invasion. It was broken by plans, fancy, wordy, media-celebrated plans drafted in air-conditioned offices, approved in solemn meetings, and released to the press with the fanfare of a coronation. The Public Sector Development Programme, by its own definition, is the government's primary tool to fund national infrastructure, spur economic growth, bridge gaps, reduce poverty, and build human capital where private investment cannot reach. It was, in other words, the sacred instrument of national salvation. And it was squandered, year after year, project after ghost project, until the nation that built Tarbela Dam and Mangla Dam found itself unable to pay its electricity bill without begging from Beijing and Washington in the same breath.
The Scale of the Squander
Let us speak plainly about what was done. In 2014, the National Economic Council approved a Public Sector Development Programme of 11.57 billion dollars at the exchange rate of that day, 101.55 rupees to the dollar. Eleven and a half billion dollars. Had that money been placed in the hands of the engineers who built the Indus Basin projects, men who completed Mangla and Tarbela in record time, under budget, to standards that still hold decades later, Pakistan today would be an exporting, solvent, industrialising nation. Instead, it was handed to a planning machinery that had already calcified into a Soviet-style rubber stamp, approving whatever ministries and line departments submitted, rarely subjecting a single project to genuine technical or financial scrutiny.
The Neelum–Jhelum hydropower project was estimated at 15.3 billion rupees in 1989. It was completed at 508 billion rupees. This is not an anomaly. This is the system working exactly as designed, by those who profit from delay, revision, and cost overrun.
Energy Policy Catastrophe
Among the most catastrophic decisions embedded in those glossy annual plans was the wholehearted endorsement of imported liquefied natural gas-fired power plants and imported coal-based power plants. Read the Annual Plan 2014–15 carefully, and you will find both recommended with enthusiasm — game-changers, we were told, that would end load-shedding and power Pakistan's economic ascent. What they ended up with was Pakistan's fiscal stability. The liquefied natural gas import bill has cost this country over 52 billion dollars in losses. The gas circular debt alone now stands at 12 billion dollars — a concept so bizarre, so uniquely Pakistani, that it did not exist before we decided to build an energy economy on imported molecules priced in dollars and sold in rupees. India imports more than five times Pakistan's volume of liquefied natural gas. India has no gas circular debt. The difference is not geography or luck. The difference is that in 2014, India's Prime Minister dissolved his Planning Commission and replaced it with a lean policy institution staffed by real experts. We kept ours, fed it more money, and let it keep planning.
The Human Cost
Pakistan is the fifth-largest nuclear power on earth. It has some of the most gifted engineers, doctors, and entrepreneurs in the world — most of whom now live and build elsewhere, because the country that produced them cannot offer them a functioning state. What followed was the slow burial of 260 million people. The petroleum levy, that invisible tax on the poor, a daily deduction from the earnings of the labourer, the motorcycle rider, the woman buying cooking oil, exists today as a direct consequence of the circular debt that bad planning created. Every rupee of that levy is a toll charged to the ordinary citizen for decisions made by planners who paid no personal price for being wrong. They are not in prison. They are not in disgrace. Some still appear on television.
A Personal Witness to Failure
I write this not only as an analyst but as a witness. In 2008, I built a real-time web-based monitoring system for Public Sector Development Programme projects, a tool that could track, from any desktop in the country, the live implementation status of every development project: labour on site, materials consumed, costs incurred, and deviations flagged. It was not a complicated idea. It was simply the application of accountability. Stakeholders, including the public, could review project status around the clock. Cost overruns could be caught before they became catastrophes. Ghost projects, schemes that existed in ledgers but not on the ground, could be exposed in real time rather than discovered, if ever, a decade later by an audit no one reads.
The website was called Good Governance. It caused more alarm in the corridors of the Planning Commission than any audit or National Accountability Bureau notice had in years. The Chairman of the Planning Commission at the time, a bureaucrat whose talent for directing contracts to preferred parties was considered a management skill, ordered me to assign a major project, already under construction, to his chosen contractor in violation of all procurement rules. I refused. I published an opinion piece instead. I sent the link to the website to those who needed to see it. My resignation followed, and the website was shut down by force shortly after my departure. The system that could have saved Pakistan billions was killed because it threatened the billions being siphoned away.
The Vanished Billions
The nation should know this. 76 billion rupees were subsequently spent on monitoring systems for Public Sector Development Programme projects. Seventy-six billion rupees is enough to build hospitals, irrigation channels, or schools. It vanished. No functioning real-time monitoring system exists today. The projects it was meant to watch continue to overrun, stall, and disappear into the accounting fog that Pakistan's planning culture has perfected over generations.
The projects bearing the most optimistic names tell the most heartbreaking stories. The President's Programme for the Care of Highly Qualified Overseas Pakistanis. The Union Council-Based Poverty Reduction Programme. The Prime Minister's Hunarmand Pakistan. Hundreds of millions allocated for capacity building, the most beloved budget line of officials who require overseas travel to build capacity. What capacity was built? Where are the completion reports? Where are the post-project evaluations that are, by the Planning Commission's own charter, a mandatory measure of whether public money achieved its stated purpose? They do not exist in any meaningful form. The clerks who were supposed to write them have other priorities. The Commission that was supposed to demand them approved the next year's projects instead.
Balochistan and the Broken Promise
The Kachhi Canal Project began in 2002 at an estimated cost of 32 billion rupees. It now stands at 80 billion rupees and remains unfinished. Balochistan burns with a rage that has many causes, but a canal that was promised and never completed is one of them. Every rupee of overrun, every year of delay, is a policy choice, a choice to let the system function without consequence, to let the planner plan without accountability, to let the minister speak without ever being asked to explain the outcome.
The Gap Between Plan and Ground
Pakistan is the fifth-largest nuclear power on earth. It has some of the most gifted engineers, doctors, and entrepreneurs in the world — most of whom now live and build elsewhere, because the country that produced them cannot offer them a functioning state. The gap between what Pakistan is and what Pakistan was planned to become is not a mystery. It is a documented record of decisions. Find the Annual Plans, read the allocations, then go to the ground and find the projects. You will find some built badly, some unfinished, and some that exist only on paper. That gap, between the plan and the ground, is where 260 million futures were lost.
The Demand for Accountability
The demand is simple and long overdue. Post-completion evaluation of every project listed in the Annual Development Programme from 2013 to 2018. Not an internal review, but a public, independent, project-by-project accounting of what was spent, what was built, and what was not. Disband the Planning Commission as it stands. Send its minister and his brigade of cronies home. Establish in its place a small, expert, technology-driven institution that monitors projects in real time, publishes results openly, and answers to the people whose money it spends. Pakistan does not need another vision document. It needs, at last, someone who will tell the truth about what became of the last one.
