Islamabad(Monitoring Desk) President Dr Arif Alvi has said that Pakistan handled the COVID situation much better than many countries in the world, especially those in our region, because we are probably geographically race-wise, weather-wise; we are very similar to India. There was total chaos on the Indian side. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people have died.
The President noted this in an interview with a foreign journalist Henna Hundal’s famous program “The Henna Hundal Show” that is available on her web TV channel at www.thehennahundalshow.com
President also expressed his vision and work on Digitization including Electronic Voting and Women Empowerment through securing their rights to inheritance.
(https://www.thehennahundalshow.com/video /pakistan?fbclid=IwAR2NCK0hUlmOAnXpqa1yR7b3li6LrustE0M0tMPY2TqS2GE6aU9jumxwzqM)
Henna Hundal had 2 guests in the show. Qaiser Nawab is a young Pakistani leader working globally for the Sustainable Development Goals and is the founder of the COVID-19 Youth Task Force, which is convening a broad array of stakeholders to control COVID-19 globally. Giovanna Mingarelli is a Canadian technology entrepreneur who serves on the Advisory Board of Women and Cloud, which is a U.N. women-supported organization that is empowering women-led STEM companies.
To the question by Henna Hundal on COVID the President said that Pakistan has had a very successful COVID strategy. For example, we’ve not gone beyond 6,800 COVID patients
in a day, not new diagnoses in a day, 6,800 for a population, which is about 220 million.
As far as the last statistics are concerned, we made sure the prime minister made the first such initiative in the world when he said that we will not go into a total lockdown because our people need money to survive. There will be widespread hunger if we shut the country down totally. So once that dictation had taken place, our data analyzers and
we went into a technical situation where we started only smart lockdowns.
Our hospitals were never overburdened, not a single day the
hospitals were overburdened. We came close to about 70 to 80% in the initial days regarding ventilators or hospital beds, but in the early days that happened.
But since then, Pakistan has not even filled up 50% of its facilities as far as COVID patients are concerned. So we have to handle them there with them. Well, plus the fact that basically this country is a very philanthropic country. People put their hands in their pockets, took
out money, and handed it to the people who are jobless and the government itself paid out 12,000 rupees to the lowest sector of the population to handle COVID situations.
Our vaccinations are almost 70 million done, out of which 50 million have had double doses. So I think we are vaccinating about more than 1.2 million people daily. There has been resistance, but Pakistan has adopted a policy that travel will be restricted to people who are not vaccinated in the government sector.
Teachers have to be vaccinated to continue their jobs. All government offices had to be vaccinated and probably they’re already done; different restrictions will come up. Telephone sales will be blocked if people do not get vaccinated after one or two warnings. So Pakistan and the people have reacted very well. We kept our masks open. We went through all our routines.
The masks in the world were close, but with SOPs we kept our mask open. So it’s a remarkable thing which Pakistan has done compared to its population. It has managed it well, but we continue to take precautions. We continue to advertise precautions. We continue with our smart lockdown policies where we feel that the possible rate would be higher. So we will continue with those policies.
DIGITALIZATION & WOMEN EMPOWERMENT
Giovanna Mingarelli asked the President that you have pioneered the use of technology for greater electoral progress during your political career, where you introduce social media platforms to politics
in Pakistan. You were, for example, instrumental in holding intra party elections in 2012 and 2013 that enabled millions of party members to digitally participate in the electoral process. One of your projects was enabling the digital identification of voters and voting of overseas Pakistanis. Can you please tell us more about that and how you believe digital ID will support Pakistan’s growth plans?
President Alvi replied that ” I think there is unanimity in the world that digital digitization of any economy increases our GDP, any GDP by 1 or 2%, number one.
Number two involvement of women in the productive cycle in the economy further increases our gross domestic product and a gross national product.
Having said that, we need to empower our women. One of the things is through education. The other is if they’re less educated to provide some loans for small situations, like for small shops that are able to
stitch garments or fashion houses of some sort, etc. to do that.
The third thing is that in Pakistan, sometimes women’s inheritance becomes an issue. So the religion of Islam has ensured that women inheritance is there since fourteen hundred years are the
cultures of different countries.So in 2020, we enacted the woman property rights law so that ensures inheritance.
The third issue which you mentioned is actually your main issue, which you question about, is the possibility of electronic voting both inside Pakistan and outside Pakistan.I had been trying to convince the opposition and move the people of Pakistan towards the ability of digital voting. The digital voting requires three or four steps.
Number one, the fact that a person has some digital ability to do it, for example, ability does not mean his knowledge or his education, but the fact that he has a smartphone. Because of the lack of smart phones, we cannot deprive the rest who have a smartphone number one. That was a discussion which took place.
Number two is that some agencies should be able to make sure that I’m the person who has this smartphone and this is my identity. That is easily done in Pakistan today because NADRA has information.
Third is the ability for the vote not to be traceable, so there can be algorithmic mixing of the words. But the ability to audit that also is possible that the keys to this algorithmic mixing can be given to three or four people. Maybe the Supreme Court, Chief Justice of Pakistan, and maybe to the Chief Election Commissioner that when all the two keys are put in, only then this can be unraveled for an audit which will not expose people’s votes but will expose it for the audit. So I think the software package needs to be developed.
Youth of Pakistan
Qaisar Nawab asked the President that the young population constitutes about 65% of the population of Pakistan. What do you see as both the economic challenges and opportunities for Pakistan in the near future?
The President answered that large number still don’t go
to school. We are imparting a skill–based training program to them. There are hundreds of skills which are being imparted through Kamyab Jawan program, Hunarmand Program (skilled person program). It improves his skills to a certain level where he’s able to improve his livelihood, and he’s also able to contribute to the economy of the country.
The second thing which we are doing is trying to ensure that a 100% population of children gets admitted to schools . We want to encourage women’s education particularly, and we have a lot of programs where we are trying to ensure the fact that there’s no dropout among the women in Pakistan. We will also probably make you aware if you are not aware that in the professional education fields like dentistry, engineering, medicine, etc. there are more women in Pakistan. In fact, in medicine, there are 80% women and only 20% male people who will become doctors and have become doctors in the past and will become doctors in the future.
The Kamyab Jawan program is a loan giving SME small and medium enterprises loan–giving agency, which disbursed about 20 billion rupees worth of money last year. And this year, the government has put in 100 hundred billion rupees for them to disburse. These are loans not related to collateral. These are loans for young people from 20, 20 to 35 or 40, and it is based on ideas and skills and less not based on collateral. So the youth bulge in the IT sector we are the presidential initiative of artificial intelligence is also trying to pick up. Students were after 10 years of education or 12 years of education, trying to teach them simple skills of writing software programs, etc. And we almost had a 50% increase in our software exports. And the productivity in the software line is increasing, so there are a number of areas where all of us are. This government is trying to get into the fast–running train of IT, which is the fourth industrial revolution.
We are working in that area for women loans also. The banks are giving out loans at much lesser interest rates compared to commercial loans. And we need to hold women’s hands. We were discussing this morning in the meeting that the loans are available, but the women are not there. So we are encouraging NGOs to come forward to guide women. It’s very difficult for a simple woman, a housewife who wants to do business to be able to develop a feasibility study. So sample feasibility studies, the banks, the effort of the banks, the effort of the politicians, they are exposing the universities to these programs
also. So for the youth bulge, we are very involved in trying to improve our youth productivity in Pakistan.
