Time was when Pakistan Steel Mills built in Karachi with the collaboration of the then Soviet Union occupied a pride of place in our industrial sector due to its overall excellent performance. When it fell into the wrong hands it didn’t take long to become a white elephant and died its natural death. Today the government has been toying with the idea of setting up again a new Steel Mills in Karachi with Moscow’s help once again which is fair enough but in order to ensure that the new Steel Mills didn’t go the way the old Mills had gone. Those who will be assigned the task to run it will have to ensure that the past mistakes aren’t repeated by its new administrative set up.
Needless to say that in this era of technological advancement in the world, Steel Mills is like an anchor sheet of defence requirements of the country. The robust the Steel Mills the stronger the military bulwark of the country. Needless to say that in today’s world those countries rule the roost militarily who have strong Steel industrial base.
POST SCRIPT
Time has proved wrong the protagonists of merger of FATA with the KPK as law and order of the tribal belt touching the revenue districts of KPK has gone from bad to worse by the day since this merger has taken place. The authors of this merger hadn’t done the necessary home work and took the merger decision in post haste thus upsetting a workable administrative system which had stood the test of time for more than a century without replacing it with a better one. Had they consulted those political agents who had spent a life time in the tribal belt and who knew inside out of the psyche of tribesmen and the geographical terrain of FATA like the palm of the hand the KPK government today would not have fallen on bad days today. What was the need of upsetting the time tested concept of collective tribal territorial geographical responsibility and FCR which was the linchpin of administration of the area without providing a better alternative the old system suited the genius of the people who lived off the tribal area.
