From infrastructure to institutions: why Pakistan’s centres of excellence matter

Pakistan’s economic policy has long been shaped by urgency rather than design. Development debates have traditionally focused on infrastructure expansion, fiscal firefighting, and short-term stabilisation—often driven by balance-of-payments pressures rather than structural reform.
While roads, energy projects, and subsidies have addressed immediate constraints, they have done little to resolve a more persistent challenge: the country’s weak capacity to generate knowledge, raise productivity, and compete in technology-intensive sectors.

This imbalance began to be acknowledged more clearly in the mid-2010s, when economic planning frameworks started to place greater emphasis on science, technology, and human capital as drivers of sustainable growth. Vision 2025, formulated during Ahsan Iqbal’s tenure at the Planning Commission, reflected this shift by arguing that Pakistan’s long-term competitiveness could not be secured through consumption-led expansion alone. Productivity, skills development, and innovation had to be brought into the centre of economic policy.

One of the more substantive outcomes of this thinking was the establishment of a national network of Centres of Excellence (CoEs), embedded within public universities and focused on strategically important domains such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, biotechnology, big data, space applications, and livestock genomics. Unlike earlier initiatives, these Centres were conceived as permanent institutions rather than donor-driven or time-bound projects. Their mandate extended beyond academic research to include industry collaboration, talent development, and commercial application.

The importance of these Centres lies not in isolated success stories but in their collective intent. For the first time, Pakistan attempted to build a coordinated national research and innovation infrastructure, spanning multiple provinces and sectors. The objective was to develop indigenous capability—reducing dependence on imported technologies while creating a pipeline of skilled professionals able to serve both public and private sector needs.

Several of the Centres address gaps with direct economic and strategic implications. The National Centre for Cyber Security was launched as digital threats increasingly affected financial systems, governance, and national security. The National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and the National Centre for Robotics and Automation focused on adapting frontier technologies to domestic challenges in healthcare, agriculture, urban management, and manufacturing—areas where productivity gains remain limited.

Similarly, the National Centre for Industrial Biotechnology sought to substitute imports through local production of enzymes, bio-pesticides, and bio-based materials, linking research outputs to industrial competitiveness. The National Centre for Big Data and Cloud Computing introduced analytical tools for health, education, and urban planning, contributing to the gradual adoption of evidence-based policymaking. The Centres for GIS and space applications and livestock genomics addressed climate resilience, disaster management, food security, and rural productivity—sectors often overlooked in high-technology discourse despite their macroeconomic significance.

Collectively, these initiatives represent a departure from Pakistan’s historically fragmented approach to research and development. Thousands of students and researchers have been trained through these platforms, startups have emerged, and local solutions have entered markets previously dominated by imports. More importantly, institutional capacity has been created that, in principle, can persist beyond individual political tenures.

That caveat, however, is critical. Research institutions are inherently long-gestation investments. Their success depends less on initial announcements and more on continuity—stable funding, credible performance evaluation, strong industry linkages, and clear intellectual property regimes. Pakistan’s track record on policy consistency remains uneven, and innovation ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to disruption caused by fiscal compression or shifting political priorities.

As Pakistan now frames longer-term economic ambitions under initiatives such as URAAN Pakistan and targets linked to its centenary in 2047, the experience of the Centres of Excellence offers a useful reference point. Infrastructure projects can be planned and executed within electoral cycles; research institutions cannot. They require patience, discipline, and an acceptance that returns accrue gradually rather than immediately.

The policy lesson is straightforward. Countries that succeed in moving up the value chain do so by investing in institutions that generate ideas, skills, and technological capability. Pakistan has taken tentative steps in this direction. Whether those steps translate into durable economic gains will depend not on vision documents, but on the ability of successive governments to protect and strengthen the institutional foundations already laid.

For a country caught repeatedly in cycles of crisis management, sustaining the institutional agenda first articulated under Ahsan Iqbal’s earlier planning frameworks—and now echoed in Pakistan’s longer-term development ambitions—may be the most difficult reform of all.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026