KARACHI: Noted economist Dr Kaiser Bengali has said the country will never progress if development projects are carried out just to facilitate influential persons.

He said this while speaking at a seminar “Climate change effects on water scarcity and food insecurity in Sindh and Balochistan: a way forward” organised by the department of economics, the University of Karachi.

He said that a project which was supposed to provide water to the metropolis was deliberately shifted to Bahria Town Karachi and now the Malir Expressway was being built to ease the way to BTK.

Dr Bengali mentioned that one of the major reasons for the flood situation that occurred in the country was that the past and the present governments did not seriously work on the infrastructures and requirements of the masses, but used their recourses to entertain their favourites.

He said it was a tragedy that after 1993, three governors of the State Bank of Pakistan came and all of them were representatives of foreign institutions and the consequences we were still suffering.

Speaking on the occasion, KU Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Khalid Mahmood Iraqi said that more than 33 million people had been affected by the recent devastating floods and around eight million people had been displaced.

Dr Zakir Hussain Dehri of the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council said that although Pakistan contributes 0.9pc to global green house gas emissions, it was among the 10 most-affected countries and was highly vulnerable to climate change because it was an agricultural country and the impact of the change on agriculture and natural resources were huge.

Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2022