The way to urbanisation

Speaking, as chief guest, at the inaugural session of the second seminar on 'Urban and Regional Planning', in Karachi, the other day, the State Bank of Pakistan Governor, Dr Ishrat Hussain, rightly urged the universities and the institutions of higher learning to take up the cudgels for finding local solutions to the problems of urban and regional planning, that is, through independent, original, research in the matter.
For one thing, the call he made, in this regard, should appeal to reason. First, the daylong moot he was addressing was held under the auspices of the Department of Architecture and Planning, NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, the institution whose Department of Architecture and Planning he had lauded for developing linkages with some of the European and regional universities.
It will be noted that among the foreign institutions he had made specific mention of the Catholic University, Belgium, Technical University, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, thereby pointing to the accuracy of NED's approach.
Secondly, he dwelt upon the need of focussing on medium-term planning, as against long-term planning, in a convincing manner. This, he explained, was necessitated by the fact that the world is now changing too fast to ensure sustenance of long-term planning.
Needless to point out, in coming to this conclusion, he must have also taken into account the bitter experience we already had in implementation of long-term plans. Many and varied have been the disappointments in pursuing even the seemingly best-conceived long-term development plans over decades past. Quite a number of them were delayed in the process of implementation, thereby too often leaving a great deal to be desired.
It will also be noted that in going for planned development we were inspired, invariably, by the understandable urge to catch up fast with the advanced countries, or with the similarly placed countries that had managed to performed better, often making the latter the model.
Again, in arriving at those decisions, generally speaking, we ignored the basic need of objective comprehension of what we really lacked and how best to proceed with the task.
More to this, there can be no two opinions on the fact that the whole concept of development revolves around making the best of available resources, which vary from country to country.
In so far as Pakistan is concerned, this country's economy, as we inherited with independence, was, and continues to be predominantly agricultural. The best option for us was to develop it, first, in accordance with its tremendous potential.
However, the early planners, instead of strengthening the economy from this approach, instead hastened with industrialisation, from what was then fondly described as starting from the scratch. That it eventually boomeranged should leave little to doubt about the flawed nature of our approach to development. However, the urge for industrialisation also shifted attention from the urgency of developing the rural areas, where agriculture essentially belongs and where the large bulk of the country's population has remained concentrated.
Again, in the process of industrialisation, more efforts had to be made for development of the urban areas with increasing emphasis on capacity building for ports and commercial centres.
These continued to serve as centres of all sorts of job opportunities, which in turn led to migration of rural population away from their homes to small and large cities for earning enough to survive. And, as the population continued to expand it all resulted in heavy influx of rural population in to the urban areas, setting the pace for all sorts of problems, thereby resulting in massive poverty in the rural areas. Little to doubt, the whole country eventually plagued by poverty, the reduction of which has acquired ghastly dimensions.
Now that efforts are being made for urbanisation's of the rural areas, the task has to be taken up from the kind of approach the State Bank Governor has rightly pointed out.