Dawn 01 June, 2020 by M.Usman
Dawn 01 June, 2020 by M.Usman
Dawn 01 June, 2020 by M.Usman
A RECENT article in this paper has raised some important questions pertaining
to the pharma sector in Pakistan. Indeed, the authorities would do well to
reflect on our predicament — especially in the midst of the ongoing pandemic
— and point to the reasons why we are unable to produce even essential
medications. Why doesn’t the country produce raw materials used to
manufacture medicines? Why does it have to rely on the import of these
products? What will happen if the supply of raw materials and ingredients
needed to make lifesaving drugs faces sudden disruptions for one reason or
another? Since the outbreak of Covid-19, which has upset the global industrial
supply chain by compelling countries across the world to enforce partial to full
lockdown to stop the spread of the deadly infection, these questions take on
greater urgency. But perhaps the answer is not too difficult after all: in a
nutshell, the fault mainly lies with our policies that discourage manufacturing
and encourage imports.
Pharma sector: . a company or org that makes and sells pharmaceuticals, drugs
Predicament: a difficult, unpleasant, or embarrassing situation
Capital-intenseve:(of a business or industrial) requiring the investment of large money.
Viable(adj): capable of working successfully; feasible.
Synthesise: combine (a number of things) into a coherent whole
high-end:[ ATTRIB. ] denoting the most expensive of a range of products.
Keeping history alive
Linking Public-Fun to Pandemic, Area most neglected.
Conclusion:
This government, in particular, has been keen to promote tourism in the country,
taking steps to that end like easing the arduous visa application process.
According to the Cultural Heritage and Museum Visits in Pakistan report by
Gallup Pakistan, tourist traffic at cultural sites increased by 317pc between 2014
and 2018. The pandemic has hit the global tourism industry hard, and local
museums are surely a part of it.
Museums:
a building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and
exhibited.
Dismantled:
verb [ with OBJ. ] ( often be dismantled ) take to pieces: the engines were dismantled a
nd the bits piled into a heap | figurative the old regime was dismantled.
1. Introduction
✓ Helping Afghanistan win the peace but also preparing for less
hopeful scenarios.
4. Conclusion
Introduction:
Four Key Areas of Foreign Policy: Four key policy areas pose immediate
challenges and have to be simultaneously addressed: 1) Navigating the US-
China confrontation 2) Dealing with occupied Kashmir and managing relations
with an implacably hostile India 3) Helping Afghanistan win the peace but also
preparing for less hopeful scenarios 4) Balancing relations between Saudi
Arabia and Iran.
Rising tensions between the US and China have a direct bearing on Pakistan.
Even as Islamabad does not want this stand-off to affect its relations with either
of the two countries, that is easier said than done. What has been described as a
new cold war will intensify in a US election year when President Donald Trump
has made China-bashing a central plank of his re-election campaign. He is both
playing off a bipartisan political consensus and fortifying anti-China public
sentiment that preceded the pandemic and has been strengthened by it.
The implications for Pakistan of the US-India entente are already evident by
Washington’s tepid response on Kashmir and continuing augmentation of
India’s military and strategic capabilities. Thus, closer US-India relations will
confront Pakistan with a regional environment of greater strategic imbalance.
Concern about CPEC and China’s Belt and Road Initiative has prompted
frequent US criticism of these megaprojects. A White House report sent last
month to Congress is more explicit, asserting that BRI will give China “undue
political influence and military access”. Statements by American officials that
CPEC will impose a heavy debt burden on Islamabad represent unsubtle though
vain efforts to drive a wedge between Pakistan and China. While Islamabad will
want to avoid getting in the cross hairs of US-China friction it is obvious that
Pakistan’s strategic future lies with China. CPEC is emblematic of China’s aim
to strengthen Pakistan, economically and strategically, and must be our
overriding priority.
Pakistan’s relations with China remain on a positive trajectory but will need
regular reinforcement. Close consultation with Beijing on key global and
regional issues, including Afghanistan, will be important.
Ties with the US have improved, but lack substantive content. For now, the
main commonality is Afghanistan. That too will be tested in coming months
when hurdles are encountered in the fragile Afghan peace process. Nevertheless,
it is important to keep engagement on a positive track while accepting the limits
of the relationship.
Islamabad thus needs to think long term and prepare for different scenarios that
might emerge in Afghanistan keeping in view machinations by regional
countries acting as spoilers in Afghanistan’s peace effort.
Faced with this, Pakistan will have to avoid any engagement for the sake of
engagement with India unless Pakistan’s concerns are accommodated in future
talks. This is hard to see under Modi.
1. Introduction
2. Health Impact
3. Domestic Violence
4. Economic Impact
5. Misogynistic Approach
6. Job-Loss and Workforce anticipation
7. Gender Inequalities and Pay gap
8. What should Govt do, Solution.?
9. Conclusion
Introduction:
The pandemic affects women at multiple levels, starting with significant health
impacts. Health workers — 70 per cent of whom worldwide are women — are
among the most vulnerable to being infected by Covid-19. But the health toll for
women extends beyond the coronavirus itself. Previous health crises, such as the
Ebola epidemic, have shown that resources are typically diverted to lifesaving
health measures from women’s health and reproductive services. The UN has
already highlighted that Covid-19 will disrupt its programmes providing family
planning support and countering female genital mutilation and child marriage,
resulting in millions of unwanted pregnancies, higher maternal mortality rates
for years to come, and millions more girls being cut.
Domestic Violence:
The Covid-19 crisis has also put the spotlight on the frequency and intensity of
domestic violence around the world — the UN Population Fund in April
estimated a 20pc increase in violence during a three-month lockdown period.
One can only imagine how much higher this figure would be if accounting for
permissive societal attitudes towards domestic violence in countries like
Pakistan.
It doesn’t help that women’s current positioning within the global economy will
force them to opt out faster than men. The ILO reports that globally women
represent 40pc of total employment, but make up 57pc of the cadre of part-time
workers; 69pc of low earners are women. In South Asia, over 80pc of women
who don’t work in agriculture are in informal employment, including domestic
work and piece-rate manufacturing jobs. These are the workers most likely to
lose their jobs and fail to qualify for government job protection schemes.
The world — especially emerging economies like Pakistan — cannot afford the
inevitable gender inequalities and pay gap that will result from this pandemic.
That’s why development agencies are urging governments to take a gender-
sensitive approach to managing the pandemic and its economic consequences.
This means focusing on saving jobs in the health, education and hospitality
sectors (that employ women) and not only in male-intensive sectors such as
construction.
Govt Responsibility:
Governments are also being asked to extend support to informal, part-time and
seasonal workers, who are mostly women, and revisit maternity, flexible
working, and sick pay policies, which could help retain women in employment.
This is asking a lot in a country where the prime minister recently sat silently by
while a cleric blamed immodest women for causing the pandemic by eliciting
God’s wrath. Or where in March the Aurat March was accused of obscenity. Or
where parliamentarians routinely use sexist and threatening language to address
their peers.
Closing Para:
Two social media scandals this week have been sad reminders of how deep-
seated Pakistani misogyny is. One especially disgusting meme suggests that a
property tycoon will give a model who has filed harassment charges against his
daughters a plot in a residential development — the accompanying image is that
of a grave. Another Twitter firestorm depicts rape as a punishment for
adulterous women. Such casual references to gender-based homicide and sexual
violence seem acceptable in our public sphere, and indicate the low stature of
women in our society. The socioeconomic ravages of the pandemic layered over
entrenched patriarchy threaten to designate women as a permanent under-class.
Will our government take action to prevent this?
Responsibility and norms
OVER the past few weeks, healthcare professionals and establishments have
come under severe pressure, and in a few cases, actual harm, from relatives and
associates of deceased Covid-19 patients. Recently, a hospital in Karachi
witnessed significant damage by a crowd of 70 enraged people. What stood out
was their insistence that the virus is actually ‘nothing’, implicitly suggesting that
the doctors and the hospital were to blame for the tragic outcome.
To clarify before proceeding further, this is not to suggest that those rampaging
in emergency wards are somehow free from any blame. To argue so would also
be an analytical and moral disservice. People need to be held accountable for
their actions and their reliance on conspiratorial crutches, especially if they have
every opportunity to know better.
Yet what we saw in these hospital wards is not particularly distinct from the
general attitude of the public towards the pandemic as a whole. What we need to
question is whether this attitude is somehow unique to Pakistan’s urban masses?
When observers posit that the Pakistani population is not equipped to follow
SOPs or is too ill-disciplined to maintain isolation and distancing requirements,
what exactly are they alluding to? These questions need to be answered because
they carry policy relevance for the fight against the pandemic in the long run.
The least valid premise (and yet unfortunately a very common refrain) is the one
that echoes some essentialism, either biological, geographic, or cultural. In this
line of argumentation, Pakistanis are somehow uniquely — sometimes said to
be genetically — disposed to flouting laws and regulations. This is obviously
not true, given how the same individuals behave very differently in a range of
similar or different circumstances. There’s nothing unique to the climate or the
genetics of this place that make SOP adherence less likely.
Once ingrained dispositions are in place, they are reproduced or curtailed based
on existing external incentive structures. For example, someone has the urge to
cross a red light, but fear of reprisal limits their desire to act on that impulse. Or,
conversely, socialisation induces mistrust of a particular act, but the offer of a
pecuniary or non-material incentive lets someone move past their hesitation.
Yet it ended up with muddled messaging, fatalism and conspiracy, and a skewed
conversation around the economic consequences of lockdowns, with actual
public health measures and norms cast aside. With government indifference,
cases, and deaths escalating in tandem, it is hard to apportion too much of the
blame on the people themselves.
Why intervene?
Saad Amir
RECENT interventions made by the Supreme Court in pandemic-related
government policy offer a glimpse into the court’s understanding of its role in
these times; one it may be drawing from a past that does not call for re-
enactment.
On May 18, a five-member bench of the Supreme Court hearing a suo motu
case on measures taken to deal with the coronavirus crisis directed the Sindh
government to seek approval for the opening of shopping malls in the province,
and proceeded to set aside the decision to enforce a countrywide lockdown of
shops, markets and businesses on weekends, as being unconstitutional.
These interventions, which reinforce the centre-led push to ease the lockdown,
drew a mixed response, heavily skewed along party lines. But when all is said
and done, the interventions are of an incremental and circumspect nature,
especially when compared with those that the court had sought to make in April,
including a push to open OPD wards in hospitals across the country. As pointed
out by the bench on May 19, neither small markets nor the large malls were
being opened on account of the court’s orders, the decisions to do so having
already been reached by the various governments.
But if the order of May 18 is to be viewed as a light-touch intervention, or
simply as a rationalisation of policy across the country, it begs the question:
‘Why intervene at all?’ Has the threshold of “questions of public importance
with reference to the enforcement of the fundamental rights” been watered-
down to such an extent that it now accommodates one’s individual right to
indulge in weekend leisure activity at a mall, in the midst of a global pandemic?
Or is it simply naïve to think that the textual underpinnings of the court’s suo
motu powers have more weight than the paper on which they are printed?
Suo motu interventions have altered perceptions of the judiciary.
Or might these tepid yet highly visible interventions be early signs of the latest
iteration of a court which has since the days of Iftikhar Chaudhry shaken off its
traditional moorings and set off in search of wrongs that it may right; no matter
how seemingly inconsequential they may be, even in the court’s own eyes?
To elaborate, the Supreme Court’s suo motu interventions have over time
altered public perceptions of the judicial branch, and its sources of legitimacy.
The very act of choosing what to take suo motu notice of can be viewed as an
expression of interest; which has implications for an institution historically
perceived as a disinterested dispenser of justice. Though the predilections of
individual chief justices may shape the manner and frequency of the use of suo
motu powers, it would appear that meeting the public’s gaze and expectations
has helped cast the superior judiciary in a new irresistible mould: the judge as
saviour and protector of the masses from the ‘mess and menace of politics’.
Though the court’s past forays into a form of inquisitorial justice have by and
large met with popular approval, overexposure to the fickle world of public
opinion, aside from guaranteeing diminishing returns, has the potential of
undercutting the traditional roots of judicial power within our democratic order.
While the recent interventions may fit neatly into the centre-led push for a
loosening of restrictions — shielding them from criticism or even eliciting
plaudits from some quarters — they disclose an alarming misconception as to
what the court’s role ought to be in such times. Democratic constitutions,
including our own, envisage a distribution of power and division of labour
amongst the several branches of government, with checks and balances meant to
shield each branch from the invasive tendencies of the others; but without
threatening the overarching goal of the Constitution: integrating these branches
into a workable government. In some contexts, this will play out in a
supervisory manner where the aim is to check and hold the other to account. At
other times, the branches will engage cooperatively to support each other’s role
in the joint endeavour.
It goes without saying that the current context screams out for the latter
approach. It calls for a respect for inter-institutional jurisdiction and an
understanding of where and when the other institutions (both federal and
provincial) are better placed to make a decision or carry out a task.
Suo motu notices (by their very nature) are not taken out of such respect; and
non-technical interventions, no matter how well-meaning, will not aid in
formulating an effective response to the ongoing crisis. In the worst-case
scenario, they may put the lives of health professionals and the general public at
risk. On all counts, they undermine the enterprise of democratic government
which our Constitution enjoins the organs of the state to assist one another in
undertaking.
In these times, the Supreme Court might do well to direct its probing gaze
inward and consider structuring its more discretionary powers; and wielding
them with greater restraint.