The sky’s the limit
By Adam Thomson • Jun 23rd, 2010 • Category: Features • 10 CommentsWhatever else Pakistanis may think about India, the evidence of economic growth there is hard to deny. Last week I visted Gurgaon, the new city outside New Delhi. It is mushrooming. Twelve years ago, when I last took a look, it practically wasn’t there. Now it has all the shopping malls, office blocks and building sites any suburban American city could dream of. And I drove there from Delhi on a six lane toll road. Things have changed.
There are all sorts of implications for Pakistan. If India can grow its economy and its middle class so fast, surely Pakistan can too? Pakistan’s average GDP growth each year since 1951 has been 5%. The senior Pakistani economists I have heard on the subject don’t think that’s quite enough to keep pace with Pakistan’s fast growing population I have visited all the provincial capitals and have yet to see anything like Gurgaon. India is aiming to grow at nine or ten percent each year. I would love to see the same level of ambition take root here in Pakistan. I am often told that Pakistan is a more liberal place in which to do business. So what’s holding it back?
It’s obviously only something Islamabad and New Delhi alone can decide but one major step - economically as well as politically - would be for the two countries to open up to each other instead of seeing their limited trade go circuitously, expensively and unofficially via the Gulf. Pakistani and Indian companies would both gain from access to the large neighbouring market.
This was the theme of a conference in New Delhi last week attended by senior Pakistanis and Indians and sponsored by the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Aman ki Asha media campaign. India’s Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee announced “The sky’s the limit” to the economic potential of better trade relations between the two countries. I know that’s easier said than done. But friends of both countries would like to see it happen soon.
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Mr. Adam Thomson CMG is the British High Commissioner to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan
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Yes,it is easier said than done.There is too much bitterness and mistrust.
Hi
Yes I agree with your article and it is very much near to fact and truth ……..
regards
Zahid
I hope they don’t take you as Lawrence of Arabia, Adam
As our former master, isn’t there is something you could do Mr. Ambassador?
Pakistan, whose growth performance was substantially better than India’s GDP growth rate (although much less so in terms of per capita income growth) before the 1990s, has been recording a much lower growth rate in some years, even a decline in per capita incomes in the 1990s which some government analysts have termed a lost decade, has undergone a series of adjustment and stabilization measures and has for the first time this year achieved a growth rate of around 5 percent. While the Pakistan Government circles have often made claims that the economy is on the verge of a take-off, most independent observers are sceptical that such a miracle is likely to happen soon.
Pakistan’s best economic hope is one that, admittedly, may seem far-fetched today — namely, to hitch its own economic development on the dynamism of India’s economy.
Aman Ki Asha is a pipedream if you minus Kashmir, which you have done so innocently from your article.
Both India and Pakistan badly need a peace dividend from a diminution in the level of military confrontation between them. This would help them in their ambitions to level up with China’s growth.
Is Briton’s own economy out of recession, that you have started advising others…..
Adam Thomson — was a comic genius! Wasn’t YOU?