Ahsan Iqbal urges all to 'come forward for country's progress'
Pakistan
Ahsan Iqbal urges all to ‘come forward for country’s progress’
LAHORE (Web Desk) – Federal Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal said on Thursday all must come forward to take part in country’s progress.
Addressing the CEO summit, the minister said that resource-rich Pakistan was facing scores of challenges due to political instability adding that economic stability could only be achieved through political stability.
He said Pakistan was the leading economy until 1999 and the PML-N’s vision 2010 in 1997 could have helped the country export electricity to India but the overthrow of the PML-N’s democratic government in 1998 resulted in pushing Pakistan behind India and Bangladesh. If we did not learn from our past, Pakistan could even be superseded by Afghanistan in the coming decades, he added.
He further said that when the PML-N came into power in 2013, the country was in the grips of acute power shortage, terrorism, and extremism. Political opposition mocked the government when the PML-N gave Vision 2025 and sought help from all the stakeholders to eradicate power shortage, terrorism, and extremism from the country, he added.
He said Pakistan’s per capita GDP was $300 as compared to China’s $200 in 1980, and the world started to see Pakistan among the top 20 economies of the world in 2017. The PML-N left the development budget at $1000bn in 2018 but during PTI s tenure, it contracted to $550bn.
