Pakistan’s Silent Hepatitis C Epidemic

Patriotism is not a loud noise that we hear only on the 14th of August. It is not only flags on the streets, or songs on television, or speeches in big grounds. Real patriotism is a quiet light that burns in the heart of a common man, every single day. It lives in the way we treat our country when no one is watching. It lives in the small choices we make from morning till night. Pakistan was not given to us as a gift. It was bought with blood, with tears, with the prayers of mothers and the sacrifices of fathers. Millions left their homes. Millions never returned. Today, the debt of that sacrifice is on us. And how do we pay that debt? Not always with great battles. Often, we pay it with small, honest, and consistent acts. Look around you. When a young boy in Lahore gets up early and sweeps the street in front of his house without waiting for anyone to tell him, that is patriotism. When a shopkeeper in Karachi refuses to sell expired medicine to a poor child, even when he could earn more, that is patriotism. When a teacher in Peshawar stays for ten extra minutes to explain one more sum to a weak student, that is patriotism. When a driver in Islamabad stops at the red light at 2 AM when the roads are empty, that is patriotism. The world may not clap for them. Cameras may not follow them. But Allah sees. And the nation grows stronger because of them. Consider our daily life. We waste water while brushing our teeth. We throw plastic on the road and then complain that the drains are blocked. We break the queue and then blame the system for being corrupt. But a true patriot asks a different question. He asks, “What can I do today?” He turns off the extra fan. He plants one tree in his street. He picks up one wrapper and puts it in the dustbin. One person doing this means nothing. But when two hundred and forty million people do this, rivers become clean, cities become beautiful, and the government saves billions that can go to schools and hospitals instead of cleaning our mess. Now look at our work. A nation is built in offices, in fields, in factories, and in classrooms. The doctor who treats every patient with the same care, whether he is rich or poor, is serving Pakistan. The engineer who builds a bridge that does not fall for fifty years is serving Pakistan. The farmer who works under the hot sun of Punjab and Sindh to grow wheat so that no child sleeps hungry is serving Pakistan. The coder in Lahore who earns dollars from clients abroad and brings that money back to Pakistan is serving Pakistan. Even the mother at home who raises her children with honesty and faith is serving Pakistan. These are not small jobs. These are the pillars of a nation. In today’s world, patriotism also lives on our phones. Every day we forward messages. Every day we post something. A patriot thinks before he types. He does not spread hate between provinces. He does not share a lie to get more likes. He speaks about Pakistan with pride, even when he is criticizing to improve. When a Pakistani student sits in London or Dubai and works hard and follows the law, he becomes the face of Pakistan. When he helps a stranger and says “I am from Pakistan” with his head high, he wins respect for all of us. We are a nation of diversity. We speak different languages. We wear different clothes. We eat different food. But we share one sky, one land, and one flag. True patriotism is when a Baloch, a Sindhi, a Punjabi, a Pashtun, and a Kashmiri sit at one table and say “We are Pakistani first.” It is when during floods, people from Gilgit send donations to people in Thar. No one asks your caste. No one asks your sect. We only ask, “How can we help?” That is the Pakistan of Quaid-e-Azam. That is the Pakistan we must protect. And what about our land? Our rivers, our mountains, our air? To harm them is to harm Pakistan. The patriot plants a tree. The patriot says no to plastic. The patriot keeps his mosque, his school, and his park clean. Because a dirty nation can never be a great nation. Dear readers, let us be clear. We do not need to do everything. But we must do something. Every day. Faith, Unity, Discipline. These were not just three words. They were a plan. Faith in Allah and in ourselves. Unity with each other despite our differences. And Discipline in our small, daily actions. Do not wait for a hero to come and fix everything. You are the hero. In your home. In your street. In your office. On 14th August we celebrate. But on 15th August, and 16th August, and every day after that, we must build. With honesty. With hard work. With love. Because nations are not built by what we say in one day. Nations are built by what we do in three hundred and sixty-five days.

Let me begin where every honest sentence on this subject must begin: I condemn, without reservation, the murder of Mir Raza Ali, the 25-year-old founder of Karachi’s beloved dessert brand Wafflix. He left his home before dawn on July 28, 2026, telling his mother he would return in ten minutes. He never did. His body was found the next day in the bushes of Gulistan-e-Jauhar, bearing torture marks and a gunshot wound. Eighteen days later, his family still waits for the truth, and I appeal — as every citizen should — for a swift, transparent investigation and justice for his killers. Nothing that follows in this essay is meant to diminish that grief. It is meant to sit beside it, uneasily, and ask why our grief is so selective. Because for eighteen days now, Pakistan’s television screens have offered something close to a live tribunal. Home Minister Zia Ul Hassan Lanjar and Inspector General of Police Javed Alam Odho face anchors nightly. Forensic reports are dissected line by line. Postmortem findings, CCTV timelines, taxi records — every fragment of evidence is turned over on air with a rigor that would not embarrass The Hague. I do not begrudge this scrutiny; a young man is dead and the public deserves answers. But I confess, with something between astonishment and despair, that I cannot recall our media applying this same forensic hunger to the killing of the country’s economy. Even the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007 — an event that reshaped this nation’s political history — did not receive this level of daily, granular dissection. Nor, in truth, did the world’s own gold standard for high-profile scrutiny, the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, sustain eighteen straight days of forensic-audit-level coverage in the country that lost him. So where is that same appetite for NEPRA and CPPA? Here is what nobody puts on a talk show: over the past three years, dozens of Pakistanis — an elderly widow in Gujranwala, a mother of four in Jahanian, a young man in Faisalabad, a payphone operator in Peshawar — have taken their own lives after receiving electricity bills they could not pay. These were not abstractions. They were documented, named, buried. And yet no anchor has spent eighteen consecutive nights asking the chairman of NEPRA why. No panel has summoned the CEO of the Central Power Purchasing Agency to explain, plainly, in language a shopkeeper in Bahadurabad could understand, why this country of 260 million people pays some of the region’s highest power tariffs while its own regulator’s reports describe capacity sitting idle. Where is the media trial of the men who told us, from 2014 to 2018, that imported coal would be Pakistan’s “game changer,” and of the former prime minister who made the same promise about LNG-fired plants? Those promises are now line items in a debt-trapped economy, in a nation reduced, again and again, to a global begging bowl. But no one is asked to answer for them on camera. They sit, as it were, behind a veil — while the Director General of ISPR and the Chief of Defence Forces routinely stand before microphones and take hard questions. Why can Pakistan’s military spokesmen face the public, but not the men who set the price of electricity for every household in the country? I want to be precise, not merely aggrieved, so let me offer what I found when I went looking myself. CPPA-G’s own energy purchase data for May–June 2026 shows three nearly identical imported-coal plants — Huaneng Shandong Ruyi at Sahiwal (1,244 MW), China Power Hub in Balochistan (1,249 MW), and Port Qasim in Karachi (1,243 MW) — dispatched at wildly different rates. Huaneng ran at roughly 73 percent of capacity; Port Qasim at only 36 percent; China Power Hub at a mere 24 percent — this despite Huaneng being, by current fuel charges, the most expensive of the three at roughly Rs. 20.38 per unit, against Rs. 15.12 for Port Qasim and Rs. 16.09 for Hub. If Pakistan’s Economic Merit Order genuinely governed dispatch, the cheaper southern plants should be running harder, not idling at a quarter of their design capacity. Something else is deciding who generates and who doesn’t — transmission bottlenecks, take-or-pay contract terms that favor Sahiwal, or simple operational failure at Hub, whose output fell 37 percent in a single month. Whatever the cause, Pakistani consumers are still paying full capacity charges for roughly 760 to 940 idle megawatts at each underused plant — fixed costs for electricity that was never produced, quietly folded into tariffs nobody explains on air. This is not a call to relent on Mir Raza Ali. It is a plea that the same courage be extended elsewhere. I am not asking media to abandon one grieving family; I am asking whether this nation’s curiosity has been rationed, aimed carefully at the stories that move ratings but never at the ledgers that move our poverty. Who decides that a private tragedy in Gulistan-e-Jauhar deserves eighteen days of forensic television, while a public catastrophe costing every household thousands of rupees a month deserves none? Is there a veil, a ghost hand, guiding our screens away from NEPRA’s boardroom and toward whatever is easier to sell? My request to Pakistan’s media is respectful, not accusatory: summon the chairman and members of NEPRA and the CEO of CPPA, and ask them, on camera, to explain the dispatch logic behind May and June’s generation data, to quantify what idle capacity is costing consumers per unit, to say plainly whether transmission constraints are forcing reliance on costlier northern plants while cheaper southern capacity sits dark, and to commit to passing any findings transparently through the Fuel Charges Adjustment mechanism, as the NEPRA Act itself demands. Pakistan is the fifth most populous nation on earth, and yet the men who preside over its power sector — the chairmen and members of NEPRA and OGRA, the leadership

For three decades, the prevailing narrative of the global economy was one of seamless integration. From the design studios of California to the high-tech assembly lines of Shenzhen, the world operated on the assumption that technology was a bridge, not a barrier. However, that era of “borderless innovation” is rapidly giving way to a more fragmented reality. As the United States and China engage in an intensifying rivalry over the foundational technologies of the 21st century artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors, and 5G a “Silicon Curtain” is descending, reshaping global supply chains and forcing a difficult reckoning for developing nations. The shift marks a transition from a world defined by economic efficiency to one governed by national security. In Washington, the consensus has hardened around the idea that “de-risking” from China is essential to protect intellectual property and maintain a military edge. In Beijing, the drive for “technological self-reliance” has become a central pillar of national survival. What began as a series of trade disputes in 2018 has evolved into a comprehensive decoupling that threatens to bifurcate the global digital ecosystem. The Semiconductor Siege and the AI Arms Race At the heart of this decoupling is the semiconductor the “oil” of the digital age. Advanced microchips are the brains behind everything from smartphones to hypersonic missiles. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce introduced sweeping export controls designed to prevent China from acquiring the high end chips necessary for training generative AI models. The “CHIPS and Science Act” further signaled Washington’s intent to reshore manufacturing, offering billions in subsidies to bring fabrication back to American soil. China has responded with its own set of defensive and offensive measures. Beijing has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into its domestic chip industry via the “Big Fund” and has imposed export restrictions on critical minerals like gallium and germanium materials essential for high-tech manufacturing. This tit-for-tat dynamic has profound implications for AI development. While the U.S. currently leads in algorithmic innovation and hardware design, China possesses a vast reservoir of data and a highly integrated industrial base. As the two powers diverge, the world faces the prospect of two distinct AI “stacks” each with its own standards, ethical frameworks, and hardware requirements. For global corporations, the cost of maintaining two separate supply chains is staggering, with some estimates suggesting a permanent 1 to 5 percent drag on global GDP. The 5G Dilemma: Infrastructure as an Ideology The rivalry is equally visible in the rollout of 5G telecommunications. As the backbone of the “Internet of Things,” 5G infrastructure is more than just a faster cellular network; it is the nervous system of modern cities. The U.S. campaign to exclude Chinese providers like Huawei and ZTE from Western networks, citing security vulnerabilities, has effectively split the world into two camps. Many European and “Five Eyes” nations have aligned with Washington, citing the risks of state-sponsored espionage. Conversely, many nations across Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East have continued to embrace Chinese infrastructure, which is often more affordable and comes with flexible financing. This infrastructure divide creates a “path dependency”: once a country adopts a specific 5G standard, the subsequent software, security protocols, and hardware upgrades are likely to follow the same technical lineage. The “Digital Non-Aligned Movement” Perhaps the most complex fallout of this decoupling is felt in the Global South. Developing nations, many of which are in the midst of their own digital transformations, now find themselves in an uncomfortable position. They are being pressured to choose between the two technological poles, a choice that carries significant economic and diplomatic risks. For a developing economy in Africa or Latin America, U.S. technology offers high security and integration with Western financial markets. However, Chinese technology often provides a lower barrier to entry and a focus on state-led development goals. The danger, according to many economists, is that this “tech-polarization” will lead to a lack of interoperability. If a startup in Nairobi develops an app on a Chinese cloud platform, will it function seamlessly for a user in a market dominated by American standards? Furthermore, the “friend-shoring” of supply chains where production is moved to politically allied nations is creating new winners and losers. Countries like Vietnam, India, and Mexico have seen an influx of investment as manufacturers seek to diversify away from China. However, other developing nations that lack the infrastructure or political alignment to join these new “trusted” supply chains risk being further marginalized. A World of Redundancy and Risk Critics of decoupling argue that the process is not only expensive but potentially futile. The global tech industry is so deeply intertwined that total separation may be impossible without catastrophic economic damage. Apple, for instance, still relies heavily on Chinese assembly, while Chinese tech firms still utilize American software architectures. Moreover, the environmental cost of decoupling is often overlooked. As both superpowers race to build redundant factories and secure mineral supplies, the efficiency gains of globalized production are lost, leading to increased carbon footprints and resource competition. The “Green Transition” itself is at risk, as solar panels and electric vehicle batteries are caught in the crosshairs of trade restrictions. The US-China tech rivalry is no longer a peripheral trade dispute; it is the defining feature of modern geopolitics. The shift from a globalized market to a fractured one represents a fundamental change in how the world innovates and communicates. While “strategic autonomy” may offer a sense of security for the superpowers, it introduces a new layer of volatility for the rest of the world. As we move forward, the challenge for the international community will be to establish a “digital floor” a set of minimum standards and protocols that allow the world to remain connected even as political systems diverge. Without such a framework, the “Fractured Circuit” may not only slow the pace of global innovation but also deepen the divide between the connected and the disconnected, leaving the most vulnerable nations to navigate a world of incompatible systems and dwindling choices.

Connecting Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) to the National Grid—and guaranteeing a dedicated clean hydro quota—is not merely an infrastructural goal; it is an ecological imperative and the definitive key to realizing the region’s full potential. High in the Karakoram and Himalayan ranges, where soaring glaciers feed the roaring Indus River, sits Gilgit-Baltistan—a land defined by its breathtaking landscapes, strategic geopolitical footprint, and an excruciating policy failure. Though this high-mountain region acts as the primary water tower of Pakistan, generating the very lifeblood that sustains the nation’s agricultural heartland and downstream hydroelectric dams, its own citizens spend their lives in perpetual darkness. For nearly eight decades since independence, the people of Gilgit-Baltistan have endured a chronic, soul-crushing energy crisis. In the harsh high-altitude winters, when temperatures plunge far below freezing and regional run-of-the-river hydel plants freeze solid or lose flow, power outages stretch to an agonizing twenty-two hours a day. Entire cities like Skardu and Gilgit grind to an absolute halt. Modern medical facilities run on expensive, precarious diesel generators, students study by the dim flicker of kerosene lamps, and families are forced to strip fragile mountain ecosystems of firewood simply to survive the winter. This domestic isolation becomes outright tragic when set against the backdrop of broader South Asian regional integration. Today, cross-border grid interconnections are becoming standard practice across the subcontinent. India has built high-voltage transmission lines linking its power architecture with Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, while making major technical strides to link Sri Lanka across the Palk Strait. Under frameworks like the “One Sun, One World, One Grid” initiative, neighboring nations seamlessly buy, sell, and route cross-border electricity to balance seasonal surpluses and deficits. Bhutan finances its national development by wheeling clean hydro power directly into the Indian market. Nepal trades its monsoon hydro surpluses across borders to avoid spilling water, pulling power back when river flows decline. Even nations separated by deep political, geographic, and sovereign boundaries manage to run copper and steel across international borders so their citizens do not sit in the dark. Yet, after 79 years of shared history, Pakistan presents an embarrassing anomaly. The state has built a national power grid that spans thousands of miles from the Arabian Sea to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and downcountry Pakistan often wrestles with systemic generation capacity surpluses, yet it has failed to link its own sovereign territory of Gilgit-Baltistan to the National Grid. Gilgit-Baltistan remains an island—an off-grid enclave stranded inside its own country, cut off from the main transmission backbone. While foreign nations in South Asia trade thousands of megawatts in real time across sovereign borders, Pakistan’s own northern frontier cannot draw a single kilowatt from the national thermal and solar reserves down south during the freezing winter months. This policy neglect is even more absurd considering that mere miles from where local populations freeze, one of the greatest engineering feats in South Asian history is taking shape. The Diamer Basha Dam Project, currently under construction near Chilas on the River Indus, boasts an astounding installed generation capacity of 4,500 megawatts and an expected annual output of over eighteen billion units of clean, renewable energy. The dam will transform Pakistan’s national economy, but it raises a fundamental moral and legal question: will it transform the lives of the people living in its shadow, or will the power simply pass over their heads to serve distant urban centers while local towns remain dark? To correct a structural imbalance that has persisted since 1947, the Federal Government of Pakistan and the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) must formally dedicate a guaranteed quota of 500 megawatts of power from the Diamer Basha Dam directly to Gilgit-Baltistan. This allocation is not an act of federal charity; it is a pragmatic, economically transformative, and ethically mandatory policy that aligns local resource rights with national progress. To understand why a 500-megawatt direct allocation is essential, one must look at the region’s fragile, isolated micro-hydel infrastructure. Historically, Gilgit-Baltistan has relied on small-scale localized plants built on seasonal mountain streams. While these plants function adequately during the summer melt, they are acutely vulnerable to climate shifts and freeze cycles. When winter arrives and glacial run-offs plummet, local power generation drops by over eighty percent. Because the region is not connected to the main transmission grid, it cannot import balancing power, leaving the local economy frozen. Despite possessing immense potential as an international hub for eco-tourism, organic agriculture, high-altitude software hubs, and gemstone processing, serious industrial investors routinely stay away due to acute energy insecurity. The cost of doing business is artificially inflated by reliance on imported fossil fuels, creating a cycle of underdevelopment that forces educated, talented youth to migrate to major cities downcountry in search of basic livelihoods. Allocating 500 megawatts out of Diamer Basha’s 4,500-megawatt capacity represents just eleven percent of the dam’s total output. For the national power sector, absorbing this slight allocation is negligible. For Gilgit-Baltistan, however, this capacity is transformative. It represents complete regional energy self-sufficiency, year-round grid stability, and surplus capacity to fuel industrial growth for generations. To execute this vision cleanly and equitably, a structured cost-sharing implementation model must be established between the federal center and the region. The federal government and WAPDA must formally ring-fence a 500-megawatt generation quota from the powerhouse specifically for the region at concessional local tariffs. In return, the regional government of Gilgit-Baltistan must take complete ownership of downstream execution. The regional government must build high-voltage transmission lines connecting the powerhouse at Chilas to major regional load centers like Gilgit, Skardu, Hunza, and Ghizer, while overhauling local grid stations and distribution lines. By dividing responsibility—federal generation matched by regional distribution—both parties build a long-overdue partnership rooted in shared accountability. An allocation of this scale does far more than illuminate living rooms; it fundamentally reshapes the socio-economic trajectory of the entire northern frontier. With a dependable baseload, Gilgit-Baltistan can transition from a subsistence economy to a value-added manufacturing and processing hub. Local mineral wealth—including high-grade marble, granite, and precious gemstones—can be processed

In a world driven by technology, only change is permanent. Change we must, but how? Transition from one system to another is perhaps the biggest challenge that we have not been able to cope with. Half-baked solutions with underage players cannot deliver. Reminds me of Einstein’s famous quote: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Steve Jobs, one of the greatest technologists of the 21st century, went even further by saying: “Either lead or get out of the way.” A few years back I was doing some research on universities and their impact on setting the course of nations. Syed Ahmed Khan’s Aligarh Muslim University stood out. It produced the Change Managers who not only led the freedom movement but also had the capacity to sustain it. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan (IRP) desperately needs such individuals who can understand and then manage the needful. In the year 1875 he founded the MAO College (Mohammadian Anglo Oriental College) which later grew into a university in the year 1920. He passed away in 1898 but the institution grew. Later on, Allama Iqbal led the movement, and finally it was Muhammad Ali Jinnah who succeeded in carving a new homeland in August 1947 for the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to lay the foundations of the new state, but he did leave clear guidelines for the inherited establishment to follow (Armed Forces, Bureaucracy). After taking over in October 1999, Pervez Musharraf created a think tank called the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB). Headed by Lt. Gen. Tanvir Naqvi, it was located in the Chief Executive (CE) secretariat. The task was to design and execute political and administrative reforms in the country. I was invited to give my input. Naqvi Sb was very confident about delivering meaningful change. His main focus was on devolution of power. As a student of management, I asked him a simple question: “Who will implement his plan?” Bureaucracy, of course, was his quick reply. He did not have an answer to my second concern: “Why will they implement a plan which reduces their power?” He then decided to get rid of me by saying if I wanted to discuss implementation details, I should go to the third floor to the CE’s office. Finally, he stepped down and was replaced by a young novice who lacked the experience and clout to deliver meaningful change. Then there was another initiative called the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD), led by a pediatrician from a small town in Oregon. The worthy Dr assured the CE that he would manage funds from abroad while the local expenses were to be provided by the Government of Pakistan (GOP). Various centers were established across the country and staff recruited. While GOP provided the internal resources, the external help never came despite fundraising efforts abroad. The CE was convinced that the two sectors were well covered, but they were not. Finally, NCHD became a liability and was shut down and the staff laid off. During my term as Chairman, Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF), I lobbied for technocrats to head technical ministries, which was not well received by the powers that be. Commercialization and application of research is the biggest challenge faced by the R&D sector of the country. When I was denied an extension after the completion of my term, I paid a farewell visit to the Secretary MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology). It was a friendly meeting; the Secretary appreciated my work but complained that I did not follow his guidelines. While leaving, he pointed at the board where the names of his predecessors were written. I still remember his words: “Only our names make it here.” He did not like my spontaneous response: “Time will tell,” and it did. My lobbying prevailed; a retired Chairman of PAEC (Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission) replaced him. Though he had no commercial background, I decided to guide and support him. He recommended major investments in creating public sector entities like HMC III, run by PAEC, for meeting their equipment needs. At best, only pilot plants were viable for transfer of technology from laboratory to industry. He was unable to get the funds. As such, his term ended with no major breakthrough, and business as usual continued. Pakistan has a federal structure of governance. Federating units are diverse with differing needs. I am in favor of devolution, but the task on hand is not simple. The forces of status quo are too entrenched. Change Managers are needed at all levels. Complexities have to be understood and managed. There has to be consensus on the road map. Islamabad has an archive of failed plans. The same mistakes should not be repeated again. The first challenge is to find qualified individuals with solid re-engineering experience to lead the crusade. Einstein and Jobs were two brilliant brains of their times; we must value their outlook to move forward and avoid chaos and confusion. Oversimplification of the task at hand must be avoided.