SEGGESTION

4/9/2020
REPORT

Ghulam Mohi Ud Din

[COMPANY NAME]
 SUGGESTION REPORT

PLANTATION OF ONE MILLION TREES IN PAKISTN:

Pakistan hit its billion tree goal in August 2017 – months ahead of schedule. Now, the hills of the
country’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are alive with newly planted saplings.The
massive reforestation project – named the Billion Tree Tsunami – added 350,000 hectares of trees both
by planting and natural regeneration, in an effort to restore the province’s depleted forests and fight the
effects of climate change. Decades of felling and natural disasters have drastically reduced Pakistan’s
forests. Figures for the country’s total forest cover range between around 2% and 5% of land area.
Nevertheless, Pakistan has one of the lowest levels of forest cover in the region and well below the 12%
recommended by the UN. It is also among the six countries that will be most affected by global warming.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had lost large areas of forest to felling, which increased the likelihood of flooding
and landslides. In 2016 flash floods hit the province, killing dozens of people.

Green success story

Cricket-star turned politician Imran Khan, whose Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party governs in Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa, spearheaded the Billion Tree Tsunami, which started in 2014 and cost $169 million. As
well as benefiting the environment, the project has established a network of private tree nurseries,
which have boosted local incomes and generated green jobs, including for unemployed young people
and women in the province. It also meant the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government surpassed its 348,400
hectare commitment to the Bonn Challenge. This aims to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and
deforested land worldwide by 2020, and 350 million hectares by 2030. It was the first Bonn Challenge
pledge to reach its restoration goal. Inger Andersen, head of the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN), the NGO in charge of administering the Bonn Challenge, described it as “a true
conservation success story”. However, the Billion Tree Tsunami has attracted criticism as well as praise
within Pakistan, and an official inquiry into allegations of corruption has been launched. Experts at
World Wildlife Fund-Pakistan, which monitored and conducted an independent audit of the
reforestation drive, say the project has been an environmental, economic and social success, VOA news
reported. Its popularity has prompted Pakistan’s federal government to launch its own Green Pakistan
programmed, which aims to plant 100 million trees in five years across the country.

Islamabad: Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday planted a tree at the Lahore chief minister’s
secretariat formally kicking off a one-day ‘Plant for Pakistan’ drive. The drive is part of PTI-government’s
bigger campaign in which around 10 billion trees would be planted across the country in the next five
years. PTI government has prioritized tree plantation and provision of forest cover to the country that is
seventh in the list of the countries, most hit by global warming. Under the one-day campaign, 1.5 million
trees will be planted and not only the PTI’s regional and central offices are organizing plantation
ceremonies, government departments and ministries are also taking steps for planting trees at their
respective offices and headquarters. During the campaign, people will be given saplings free of cost at
190 distribution points across the country. According to government spokesperson, the purpose of the
campaign is to encourage people, communities, organizations, business and industry, civil society and
government to collectively plant trees. Two months before July 25 elections, Imran Khan while
addressing a huge public rally had given 11-point agenda of his government making tree plantation one
of the points. PTI government would aggressively undertake a massive countrywide campaign to plant
10 billion trees in the next five years to tackle climate change, he had said. Former sports celebrity-
turned-politician Imran’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has emerged as the largest political party in the
July 25 parliamentary elections and it has already rolled out its reforms programmes in police,
government offices, education, health and other sectors. The PTI government is “fully prepared” and
plans to launch its proposed “10 Billion Tree Tsunami” program in the first 100 days after assuming
governance, party officials said. Reversing environmental degradation and managing climate change
through the reforestation campaign will be at the core of PTI’s governance, he said. In an interview with
media persons recently, Khan said, “I have always been a conservationist, because I was a hunter from a
very young age and I saw the diminishing forests and the disappearing wildlife in Pakistan. ”It has always
been in my mind that we needed to regenerate our forests because there was a massive destruction of
our forests by the timber mafia, one of the most powerful mafias,” said Khan. Pakistan is seventh on the
list of the countries mostly likely to be affected by global warming and has one of the highest
deforestation rates in Asia. Decades of tree felling have reduced the country’s forests to less than 3 per
cent of its land area. About 40 per cent of the remaining forests are in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Khan
said. When asked how would realize his dream of 10 billion tree tsunami, he said the PTI-government
would make it possible on the basis of success of 1 billion trees tsunami in KP.

CONSTRUCTION OF FIVE MILLION HOUSES:

The incumbent government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insafe (PTI) has finalized the strategy to build five
million houses as Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan is set to announce the details of the project in the
coming week. The government has decided to immediately start construction of the houses in parts of
the country after which, they will be given to the homeless people on easy instalments. However, the
places for construction of the houses have also been inspected. Earlier, PM Imran Khan had announced
to build 10,00,000 houses per year to bring economic revolution. “We will have to conduct one window
operation to construct 50 lac houses,” he said. The premier asserted that construction of five million
houses will be a hallmark of PTI government as we are resolute to give our new generation a safe and
healthy environment. Prime Minister Imran Khan on Monday decided to lay foundation stone for
construction of five million houses in Islamabad, Quetta and Gwadar. According to a report, in first
phase, the groundbreaking ceremony would be held in Islamabad on April 17 in which more than 19000
flats would be constructed in the federal capital at four different points. The groundbreaking ceremony
of the project in Quetta will be held on April 21 under which around 110,000 flats would be constructed.

PROVISION OF 10 MILLION JOBS ON PAKISTAN:

The much-trumpeted pre-election promise of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government was to
create 10 million jobs in its five-year term. This is not an unreasonable target. For example, my analysis
in the Pakistan National Human Development Report, released by the United Nations Development
Programmed (UNDP) last year, places the minimal requirement at around 1.5 million new jobs per year,
primarily spurred by the demographic momentum of our youth bulge. It is also not an impossible target.
After all, the raw data of recent Labor Force Surveys (LFS) suggests that about one million people are
added each year to the ranks of those classified as ‘employed’ by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).
Employment in Pakistan, however, is a hot-button political and social issue not only because there are
too many without jobs (official unemployment rates in Pakistan have been historically kept at single digit
levels), but even more so because too many of those who have jobs believe they are not reasonably
paid, fully employed, or decently treated. The malaise of being trapped in jobs without gain,
employment without growth, and work without dignity creates its own toxic vortex of economic
dissatisfaction, social disaffection and political discontent — particularly amongst the young. This is not a
pleasant mix. Pakistan’s political and economic futures will depend, in large part, on whether we can
provide decent jobs, gainful employment and dignified work to our youth. The question, then, is not
simply whether we can create enough new jobs, quickly enough. It is, more fundamentally, whether
enough of the new jobs — as well as existing ones — can be made to be good jobs. This is not going to
be easy to do. But it is doable. There are a number of important lessons about the generation of work
that we can learn from the experience of Pakistan, and the world. This essay seeks to summarise some
of these lessons about what government and policy can do to create a national ecosystem that is
conducive to the large-scale and consistent creation of quality employment. Here are five ideas that
might help.

ITS NOT the GOVT’S JOB TO DISH OUT JOBS

A GOVT’S JOB IS TO CREATE WORK
COUNT JOBS, SO JOBS COUNT
DECENT WORK, FOR ALL
INVEST IN WORKERS, WORK WILL FOLLOW

ITS NOT the GOVT’S JOB TO DISH OUT JOBS

Governments, all over the world, are often major employers. That is how it should be. But looking
towards government to directly provide new jobs at the speed and scale required is a recipe for disaster
by bloat. It is a disaster Pakistan is very familiar with. Most governments are not very good at dishing out
jobs, and Pakistan has been particularly bad. The image that comes to mind is that of Pakistan
International Airlines (PIA), of Pakistan Railways, of Pakistan Steel Mills; of political influence controlling
placements of schoolteachers or municipal workers. These, very often, are images of excess, nepotism
and corruption; of overstaffing and underperformance. Of course, not all government staffing follows
this pattern; but enough do for the image and expectation to have become tainted. The political culture
of government jobs as handouts has not served anyone’s interest. National development gets stalled.
Employee disaffection mounts. The government, as an employer, should set standards for other to
follow, including in enforcing its own policies of worker quality, rights and safety. But simply producing
jobs for political gain is no better than printing money for similar purpose. There are times when money
has to be printed, and there are also times when jobs have to be injected into an economy. But such
times should be few, and carefully thought through. Where government jobs do need to be created,
they should be created for reasons of need and efficiency, not for expediency. A good example of such
an area should have been education. By even the most conservative estimates, Pakistan needs to double
the number of schoolteachers. This would clearly produce an employment windfall, but only if qualified
teachers could be found and incentivized through a merit-based process. On that, our track record
remains woefully dismal.

A GOVT’S JOB IS TO CREATE WORK

While it is not a government’s job to dish out jobs, it is the government’s job to create work. More
precisely, to create the enabling policy conditions in which work, and good jobs, can be created. There
are, in fact, good examples of the government enabling large-scale new employment through policy
innovation. For example, the opening up of the telecommunication sector (particularly mobile phones)
created an immediate and large influx of new, good jobs. So did the policies that enabled the
mushrooming of the private electronic media. This can also happen in a number of other areas. Tourism,
as a service sector motor, is mentioned often. Housing would be another area that could trigger large-
scale job creation. Infrastructure development has been used around the world, often and with success,
as a stimulus investment. The most exciting, in many ways, would be grabbing the energy transition by
its horns. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that over 10 million renewable
energy jobs have already been created worldwide, and the coming transition to cleaner energy is poised
to reduce the cost of production, while doubling the number of jobs in the energy sector. But simply
throwing out these ideas is not enough. They have to be carried out with the employment imperative
very much in the forefront. The problem is that policy tends to view employment as a somewhat
incidental outcome of economic policy, rather than as a central preoccupation. Those who influence
policy decisions — politicians, bureaucrats, economic experts, journalists — tend to be obsessed with
growth and investment. The currency of their narratives is dollars, not jobs. Consider, for example, that
just about anyone in Pakistan will be able to tell you how many billions of dollars’ worth of investment
will come to Pakistan with the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), or how many billions of rupees
is spent on the Lahore Metro Bus project. But try to find anywhere in the public discourse, or even
government documents, a clear calculation of how many jobs are to be created by the one or the other
and you will hit a wall.

COUNT JOBS, SO JOBS COUNT

Employment data — labour statistics, as they are called in Pakistan — are notoriously difficult to get
hold of, and notoriously unreliable when you do get hold of them. In particular, reasoned counts of new
jobs created — a staple in most countries — are not easy to come by. This will have to change before
the narratives of policy and politics around employment can change. In many countries, and not just the
most economically advanced economies, employment data are at the heart of the political discourse.
Politicians will incessantly highlight how many jobs they created in their city, region or nationally, or how
many they intend to create if elected. The bragging right belongs to those who can claim to have
brought jobs to their constituents. Employment numbers are often at the center of election campaigns.
This makes for good politics, but also for good economic policy. Such a discourse, however, requires
reasonable numbers to argue over. In many countries, they are available not only nationally, but for
regions and cities, and often at monthly, if not quarterly intervals. This is not so in Pakistan. Some
practical measures could include: (a) ensuring that major project documents, for example, for and from
the Planning Commission, make employment targets public; (b) requiring federal and provincial budget
speeches to calculate employment impacts of proposals; or (c) changing the frequency and content of
data collection by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Archaic and boring as this may sound, I believe that
simply collecting and making such data accessible can unleash a more positive public and political
discourse on employment. Jobs will count more, I am convinced, once we start counting jobs better.

DECENT WORK, FOR ALL

Even though we have talked mostly in the language of jobs and employment, it is work that we are most
concerned about. Work enables people to earn a livelihood and be economically secure, but it is more: It
is a source of dignity, of purpose, even identity. Consider the question: “What do you do?” It is amongst
the most common questions we ask of someone we do not know. And it becomes a most fundamental
element of how we get to know them. Work, whether it comes with formal employment or not, is
meaningful when it allows people to fully participate in and be recognized for their contribution to
society. Society is healthy when each citizen is afforded the right and ability to find work that is
meaningful and provides them with a sense of dignity and worth. Such a conceptualization has at least
two immediate implications for Pakistan. First, employment should be made good employment. On the
one hand, this is a question of the working conditions and worker rights. The challenge is of
implementation, not policy. Laws can be improved, but a first step has to be to enforce the ones already
on the books, including the many international treaties that Pakistan has ratified. On the other, there is
the systemic challenge of ‘casualization’ of work in Pakistan. Casual work is typically exploitative, low-
paid, with poor working conditions, no social security cover and little job security. Less than half of those
who are classified as ‘employed’ have full time jobs with any semblance of benefits or rights. The
remainder include piece-workers, daily-wage workers, self-employed and family workers. Second, there
is the imperative to include those whose work is not counted and those who face structural barriers to
work. Women are of particular importance in both these categories. According to work time surveys, the
total amount of time spent on work by women (365 minutes a day) is more than that spent by men (350
minutes a day). However, the majority of women’s work in Pakistan is unpaid (287 minutes or about 78
percent). It should not be a surprise that nearly half of Pakistani men, but only one in seven of Pakistani
women, are counted as employed. Women have many structural hurdles to surmount — from lack of
simple amenities such as working and safe toilets to facing much higher costs of transportation to work.
The net result is that it is far more ‘expensive’ for women to work than for men. This is compounded by
the steep inequity in wages for women and men in all sectors. According to the 2017-18 Labour Force
Survey, the average monthly wage across all sectors is 18,754 rupees per month. For men, this is 19,943
rupees per month; for women only 11,884 rupees. The inequity persists in every sector and every role.
For example, men as managers earn an average of 57,522 rupees per month, women earn 50,009
rupees. At the other end of the scale, in the most elementary services category (e.g., household help),
men make an average of 14,206 rupees per month, women only 6,587 rupees. We need to confront the
fact that women are absent from the formal workforce not because they do not wish to work, but
because we have made it structurally difficult — and more expensive — for them to work. The cost of
this choice is borne not just by women but by the well-being of society, from the household to the
national levels.

INVEST IN WORKERS, WORK WILL FOLLOW

The only thing as important as investing in quality work is to invest in quality workers. Unfortunately,
the emphasis in both cases has been on quantity. This is particularly stark — and tragic — in the realm of
education and training. Especially in terms of higher education and vocational training, the single-
minded focus has been on expansion — creating more institutes, enrolling more students. Quality has
been the casualty and battalions of the educated unemployables is the result. The unacknowledged
truth is that too many of those who hold educational ‘qualifications’ may just not be qualified for the
jobs they seek. In most countries of the world, those with higher educational attainment have a lower
rate of unemployment. In Pakistan, this number stands on its head. Unemployment is lowest amongst
the least skilled and least educated (around five percent), and is highest amongst the most educated
(around 20 percent). Even if there is some merit in the conventional wisdom that there are not enough
jobs for the most educated, or that the most educated become too selective in their job preferences,
conversations with employers routinely bring out the lament that quality candidates amongst the
supposedly qualified are hard to come by. The most important failure has been of our educational
system. The problem is most illustrative at universities, but it is systemic at all levels. Universities receive
too many students unprepared for higher education, and already burdened by a chronic shortage of
quality faculty, spew out graduates unfit for the workplace. A cycle of mediocrity would have been bad
enough, but ours is a vicious downward spiral where the bad only leads to the worse. Without
concertedly reasserting quality into the education system — from the primary onwards, and certainly at
the higher education level — the entire human resource stream will remain poisoned. A Pakistan that
produces half the university graduates at twice the current quality, is much more ready to face the
nation’s employment challenges than one that throws out twice the number of graduate at the same
quality as now. Preparing a new generation for the employment markets of the future is not about
changing what they study, it is about a single-minded emphasis on how they are taught. The two silver
bullets that are often mentioned in the context of education and training are (a) vocational training and
(b) entrepreneurship. Both, of course, are vital. Neither is a silver bullet, nor easy to invest in. The
vocational system has been motivated by the whims of donors and planners, rather than the needs of
employers; and the conversation around entrepreneurship has been so invested on the flashy high-end
of information technology that it has mostly missed out on local market needs. The logic of enterprise
remains robust: invest in people who will invest in jobs. However, the entrepreneur to be celebrated is
not just the one that breaks into international markets, it is the one who expands local markets. In
vocational training, as in entrepreneurship development, the key challenge to overcome is of relevance.