Dr Zafar Malik: (Journalist, Analyst)

During the recent visit to China Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif held meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders. Chinese President Xi Jinping, in his meeting with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, said that it was a matter of pleasure to meet PM Shehbaz Sharif second time in a month. Xi said they earlier met in Samarkand. All the political parties of Pakistan have links with the Communist Party of China (CPC). The visit of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to China was successful as he held meetings with the top leadership of CPC, which shows that no only both the countries but the political parties of both the friendly counties have strong relationship. Pakistan was the second country with highest number of students studying in China before Covid-19 Pandemic. Pakistan and China have various exchange programmes under which students and cultural delegations of both the countries regularly visit each other’s countries. Chinese players also participated in Pakistan Super League (PSL); Similarly Pakistani movies also gathered a great applause in China. China Pakistan Economic Corridor is a flagship programme, which includes cooperation in various sectors. Many sectors including infrastructure, education and tourism have seen tremendous improvement. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is known as Punjab Speed in China. China also wants to get benefit from Pakistan’s experiences in various fields. Pakistan has achieved target of export of one million tonnes of rice to China. Similarly China has allowed import of Cherry from Gilgit Baltistan and Pakistan will export cherries to China.

Hammad Naqi Khan (CEO WWF)

The process of dealing with the effects of the climate change at the global level had started in 1990s when United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed to which Pakistan is also a signatory. It is correct that Pakistan is a developing country and it has negligible contribution to the emission of greenhouse gases as compared to the developed countries but Pakistan is the biggest victim of the adverse effects of the climate change. It was decided to create a Green Climate Fund which contains 11 to 12 billion dollars. Pakistan fully supports the efforts to mitigate the climate change effects. There are number of things that we have to improve in our country including capacity building of the departments. This year Pakistan has experienced above normal rains in the monsoon spell which caused floods but another factor responsible for the damage caused by these floods was construction on the water courses, which should not be allowed in future.   

Ikhtiyar Baig (Economist): During the tenure of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif the shortfall of energy was overcome as 10,000 MW additional power was generated. The shortfall between demand and supply had ended and there was no question of power load-shedding. We needed to improve the transmission and distribution in the power sector which could not be upgraded. The power breakdown is usually caused by the lack of capacity of the transmission and distribution system in our country. The industry is in dire need of the natural gas for generation of electricity by the industrial units. The natural gas is provided to the domestic units by cutting the supply of industries due to which the industries fail to meet the targets of export consignments. The losses in power distribution are being collected from the consumers who pay their bills regularly which is injustice. Installation of advance metering system, the administrative measures to check the power theft and recovery of bills are the solutions for improvement in the power sector.