ISLAMABAD (APP) - President Dr Arif Alvi on Thursday underlined the need for nurturing the ‘intellect ability’ and ‘innovative ideas’ of the educated youth to achieve the required goals of national progress and prosperity.
“Pakistan does not lack solutions [to confronted issues] but the doers,” he said while addressing the award distribution ceremony of the grand finale-III of the country’s biggest ideas competition held under the National Idea Bank (NIB) vision, organised by the National University of Technology (NUTEC) and ASPIRES Pakistan.
He said the ideas, shared by the youth in the competition, needed such an environment where these could be transformed into qualitative and competitive products, enabling the country to increase its exports and reduce imports.
President Alvi said he had been proponent of exploring innovative ideas for the last 15 years. He said this was the best forum through which the youth could be engaged to seek innovative ideas.
“This is era of human resource and innovation so the intellectual ability is the most important in this regard,” he added.
Sharing success story of the country’s data management on scientific lines coupled with ideal civil-military cooperation during COVID-19, he said Pakistan was declared the third best performing country in the world, while its neighbouring countries were far behind in this index.
He said Pakistan had utilised the experience and data collected during countrywide anti-polio drives to properly manage the disease spread.
He said the country should have to make similar and effective policies to improve world ranking in other areas as well. He said some 26.2 million children were currently out of school across the country.
The president pointed out that this area too needed proper attention as without developing human resource, the country could not compete with the world.
He also raised questions about the validity of the recent polls, asserting that the introduction of electronic voting machines (EVMs) could have averted the chaos surrounding the election results.
Emphasising the potential benefits of EVMs, he stated that their use could have ensured a free, fair, and transparent electoral process by digitally counting votes.
He expressed a lack of hope and trust in the current accountability system, citing allegations of rigging in the Feb 8 polls. Emphasising the need to promote unity in the country, the president said without unity the country could not achieve goals of stability, prosperity and development.
Referring to the atrocities being done in Gaza, Palestine, he said the world was compromising their moralities on their vested interests.
The president maintained that due to the world’s focus on vested interests, discrepancies between the poor and rich were increasing.
He said currently over 2.2 million freelancers were working in the country earning precious foreign exchange. However, he feared that this talent of the youth was being exported which was needed to be stopped.
Earlier, President Alvi distributed awards among the top 15 successful participants for their innovative ideas and organisers of the competition.
National University of Technology Rector retired Lt Gen Moazzam Ejaz said it was the president’s idea to provide youth an enabling platform to seek innovative ideas to improve the country’s exports and reduce imports.
He said the country’s youth were very talented and they were fully capable of leading the country towards prosperity and development.
Chairperson ASPIRES Pakistan and founder of NIB Hassan Syed thanked the president for providing full support for this initiative aimed at making the country prosperous by promoting the culture of entrepreneurship.
He said the award winners would be sent to Silicon Valley of the US, a home to many start-up and global technology companies, for the learning purpose so that they could play their role in imports substitution and enhancement of exports of the country.
The NIB project director, Shehzana Memon, informed that under the initiative, the NIB received more than 6,000 ideas since its inception in 2021 out of which 40 materialised leading to establishment of companies in various areas.