Justice delayed & wrongdoers’ profitability

The world’s largest democracy appears to be at a defining moment in its history, where fundamental questions are once again being raised about the future of the state, politics, constitutionalism, the judiciary, the media, and the country’s broader social order. Consecutive electoral victories by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have elevated the ideology commonly known as Hindutva, often associated with Hindu majoritarian politics, to the centre of India’s political discourse. Its proponents describe it as an effort to reclaim India’s ancient civilizational identity and cultural heritage. Critics, however, argue that the notion of a single, unified ancient Indian civilization oversimplifies the subcontinent’s historical evolution. For centuries, the Indian subcontinent has been shaped by a mosaic of religions, kingdoms, languages, ethnic communities, commercial networks, and cultural exchanges. Rather than reflecting a single, monolithic civilization, its history reveals a continuously evolving and pluralistic civilizational stream. In today’s interconnected digital age, many historians and political commentators argue that reconstructing such a singular historical identity is neither historically accurate nor socially attainable. They contend that the project has placed India’s constitutional secularism, communal harmony, and federal balance under unprecedented strain. Since assuming office in 2014, the Modi government has introduced a series of policies that have generated intense political debate both within India and internationally. The abrogation of Article 370, which revoked the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), discussions surrounding a Uniform Civil Code, legislation targeting religious conversions, incidents of mob violence associated with cow protection, and the use of “bulldozer politics” in several states have all contributed to deep political polarization. According to many political observers, Hindutva has evolved beyond an ideological movement into a powerful influence over electoral politics, state institutions, public discourse, and sections of the media. Critics argue that Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits, and, at times, even Hindus expressing dissent have experienced growing political and social pressures. The government and its supporters reject these allegations, maintaining that the rule of law applies equally to all citizens and that such criticisms are politically motivated. Debate has also intensified over the independence of India’s judiciary, Police, investigative agencies, and media institutions. Former judges, retired civil servants, journalists, and civil society representatives have, on various occasions, expressed concerns regarding institutional autonomy. The government, however, insists that India’s constitutional institutions continue to function independently and effectively. The role of the media has emerged as another defining feature of this political transformation. Critics contend that sections of mainstream television increasingly amplify the government’s narrative while providing limited space for dissenting voices. Independent journalists and digital media platforms have similarly argued that the space for critical journalism has narrowed. Government representatives, on the other hand, maintain that India’s media landscape remains diverse, vibrant, and free. Electoral politics constitutes another important dimension of this debate. The BJP’s sustained electoral success is widely attributed to its highly organized party structure, the extensive grassroots network of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), sophisticated campaign strategies, an effective digital presence, and Prime Minister Modi’s personal popularity. Opposition parties, particularly the Indian National Congress, have repeatedly raised concerns regarding campaign financing, the alleged misuse of state institutions, voter registration practices in certain regions, and unequal political conditions. These competing narratives remain the subject of intense political contestation. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has sought to counter the BJP’s political narrative through initiatives such as the Bharat Jodo Yatra and the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. His central argument has been that India’s enduring strength lies in its constitutional democracy, religious pluralism, cultural diversity, and linguistic richness rather than in majoritarian politics. According to Gandhi, safeguarding constitutional institutions and preserving social cohesion are essential to India’s democratic future. Recent demonstrations, political mobilizations, and episodes of public unrest across different parts of the country have revived questions about whether India is entering a new phase of political transformation. Should these expressions of public discontent evolve into a broader nationwide movement, some analysts believe they could represent the most significant democratic mobilization since the Emergency imposed in 1975. Whether such a transformation materializes will ultimately depend on public participation, opposition unity, the state’s response, and the resilience of India’s constitutional institutions. Historically, India’s greatest strength has been its extraordinary civilizational diversity, religious pluralism, federal structure, and democratic traditions. If growing political divisions are not addressed through constitutional mechanisms, democratic dialogue, and the rule of law, their consequences may extend beyond India’s borders, affecting regional stability, economic cooperation, and prospects for peace across South Asia. The defining question, therefore, is not simply which political party will win the next election. Rather, it is whether India can preserve the foundational principles of its Constitution, democracy, federalism, religious freedom, the rule of law, and equal citizenship, for future generations. The answer to that question is likely to shape not only India’s political trajectory but also its role on the global stage in the decades ahead.

To watch Shakarparian today is to mourn a broken promise. Not a fleeting vow, but a masterplan—conceived with purpose, codified on paper, and abandoned by design. I went through archives at Bazar Road, Iqbal Hall G-7, poring over the original master plan drawn up in 1960 by the great Greek architect and city planner Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis and his team. It was there that I first understood what Shakarparian was always meant to be. Doxiadis and his fellow planners did not design this triangle-shaped green expanse near Zero Point as an afterthought, a leftover patch of land between roads. They designated it, deliberately and explicitly, as the lungs of Islamabad — a temperature regulator, a natural sound barrier, a groundwater recharge zone, and a protective forest without which the city’s clean air was never meant to exist. This was not sentiment. This was engineering. And we have spent the decades since betraying it. Islamabad in 1961 was home to barely 117,000 people. Today it holds well over 2.4 million. That growth was not an accident — it was, in part, the very success of Doxiadis’s vision: a green, livable, breathable capital that drew people in from across the country and beyond. But success has a cruel irony here, because the same city that grew because of its green lungs has spent decades quietly cutting into them. Between 1961 and 2024, Islamabad’s temperature has already climbed by 5 degrees Celsius, with projections warning of a further 0.7 degrees by 2039 and 2.2 degrees by 2069. This is the urban heat island effect, and it is not an abstraction — it is Doxiadis’s temperature regulator being dismantled, piece by piece, exactly as he warned it must not be. Shakarparian itself covers roughly 1,376 hectares, formally absorbed into the Margalla Hills National Park in 1980, sitting almost at the very heart of the capital — an emerald set into the city’s crown, as it deserves to be called. A biodiversity survey conducted in November 2014 found 155 animal species sheltering within it: 23 species of mammals, 104 species of birds spanning 16 orders and 42 families, 22 species of reptiles, and 6 species of amphibians. The same survey catalogued more than 661 plant species across 28 families, with six distinct dominant vegetation communities knitting the forest floor together. This is not a park. This is a living, breathing ecological archive sitting in the geographic center of a national capital — a rarity almost nowhere else replicated in the world. It was Roedad Khan — the legendary civil servant and statesman — who understood the fragility of this inheritance early enough to act. In 1989 he founded the Margalla Hills Society, and for decades that institution has done more than most government departments to keep the wider Margalla ecosystem intact. But Shakarparian, sitting apart within it, has not been so fortunate. It has instead become a recurring casualty of the very authority meant to protect it — the Capital Development Authority itself. Piece by piece, lease by lease, CDA has allowed Shakarparian’s protective forest cover to be carved away. Look at what now occupies ground that was meant to remain forest: the Parade Ground, the Pak-China Friendship Centre, the Islamabad Club, the Gun and Country Club, Lok Virsa, an open-air theatre, and a string of upscale hotels and restaurants. Each addition was, in its own file, justified. Together, they are a forest reduced to a backdrop for institutions that no longer need it and increasingly cannot coexist with it. This has happened in direct violation of Regulation 4(3)(b) of the ICT Zoning Regulations of Islamabad, which exists for the explicit purpose of preventing exactly this kind of land-use change, allegedly under sustained political pressure. Satellite imagery from Landsat and Sentinel spanning the last twenty years tells the story without need for further commentary: the southwest region of Shakarparian shows a stark, measurable retreat of forest cover. The judiciary, at least once, was willing to look squarely at this. On January 11, 2022, the Islamabad High Court delivered its verdict in Prof. Zahid Baig Mirza versus Capital Development Authority, and the ruling was unambiguous: the shifting of the Parade Ground into Zone 3, the widening of roads through the forest, and the construction of the China Friendship Centre inside Shakarparian all violated the ICT Zoning Regulations. It was, on paper, a vindication of everything Doxiadis intended and everything CDA had ignored. A court verdict that is not enforced, however, is simply another document gathering dust the way the original master plan itself so nearly did. And here I have to say something that will not make me popular in certain circles of this city: the NGO sector stationed in Islamabad has failed Shakarparian as thoroughly as CDA has bulldozed it. The single biggest failure of these organizations is that they will not raise their own voice — they wait, always, for the government to raise it first, as though advocacy requires official permission. That is not activism. That is choreography. Too many of these NGOs are, in practice, family businesses wearing the language of conservation: leadership passed quietly within the same households for years, boards that never rotate, and a business model built not around planting a single tree in Shakarparian but around producing glossy reports, attending conferences, and mastering the art of recycling the same handful of buzzwords — resilience, sustainability, nature-based solutions — into slightly different sentences for slightly different donors. They are experts in rephrasing a crisis. They are not experts in stopping one. When the chainsaws reached the H-8 green belt, it was a lone campaigner and a worried student who spoke up first, not the well-funded organisations whose entire mandate is supposed to be exactly this. This failure is made worse by the fact that the government itself is not short of obligations it has already signed onto. Pakistan is a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which binds it to conserve representative ecosystems and halt biodiversity loss

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when a war refuses to end on schedule. Five months into the conflict between the United States and Iran, we are living through it. Ceasefires are announced and collapse within weeks. Strikes are billed as decisive and are followed, days later, by more strikes. Each side insists the other will soon come to its senses, and each side is wrong. What we are watching is not a war moving toward resolution. It is a war that has become self-sustaining, and the longer it runs, the more countries get pulled into its logic whether they wanted a role in it or not. Saudi Arabia is the clearest example. For nearly four years, Riyadh had quietly extracted itself from the Yemen war, treating the 2022 ceasefire with the Houthis as one of the few unambiguous foreign policy wins of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s tenure. That restraint is now gone. When the Houthis resumed missile fire at Israel in solidarity with Tehran, and then began striking Saudi oil infrastructure directly, Riyadh had no real choice but to respond. It bombed Hodeidah. The Houthis retaliated against Aramco facilities in Yanbu and Jizan. A conflict Saudi Arabia spent years trying to bury is now, again, live on its border, not because Riyadh chose it but because a war between Washington and Tehran left no room for neutrality. This is the pattern worth naming plainly: nobody in this conflict is fighting the war they intended to fight. Washington launched its campaign framed around Iran’s nuclear program, wagering that decisive strikes would force capitulation or collapse. Instead it has strikes running past the two-week mark with no clear terminus, American service members killed in Jordan and Iraq, and a president publicly conceding that the exit could be “diplomatic or military” — which is another way of saying nobody currently knows how this ends. Iran, for its part, has responded to devastating strikes on its cities not with capitulation but with exactly the kind of asymmetric, proxy-driven defiance its doctrine was built for, activating fronts in Iraq, the Gulf, and now Yemen that cost it little and cost everyone else a great deal. The Strait of Hormuz tells the same story in economic terms. Daily vessel traffic through one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints has fallen to a small fraction of its prewar level. That is not an abstraction. It shows up in tanker insurance premiums in Piraeus and London, in fuel costs in Mumbai and Rotterdam, in the balance sheets of countries that have precisely nothing to do with this fight. War aims that once seemed narrowly bilateral — Washington versus Tehran, over centrifuges and missile stockpiles — have metastasized into a tax on global trade that nobody voted for and nobody can opt out of. It is tempting, watching this unfold, to look for a single culprit. Commentators sympathetic to Washington will point to Iran’s decades of proxy warfare, its nuclear ambiguity, its crackdown on its own protesters, and argue the current campaign is simply overdue accountability. Commentators sympathetic to Tehran will point to a US-Israeli strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and ask what state, faced with the assassination of its head of state, would not treat that as an act of war demanding a response. Both arguments contain real grievances. Neither survives contact with what has actually happened since: a conflict that both sides insist is about narrow, defensible aims but that neither side has been able to keep narrow. Wars rarely stay the size their architects intend. What should worry observers most is not any single strike or retaliation but the absence of an exit ramp anyone believes in. Ceasefires here have not functioned as steps toward peace; they have functioned as pauses for rearmament, evidenced by how quickly each one has collapsed back into nightly bombing. That is the signature of a conflict without a theory of victory — one where both governments can inflict real pain on the other indefinitely, but where neither can convert that pain into a settlement it can sell to its own public. In that kind of war, the fighting does not stop because someone wins. It stops, if it stops, because the costs finally exceed what either government’s domestic politics can absorb — and on the evidence of the past five months, that threshold keeps receding rather than approaching. Saudi Arabia’s reluctant return to the Yemen battlefield should be read as an early warning rather than a footnote. It shows how a conflict that both Washington and Tehran describe as fundamentally about themselves keeps finding new participants who never agreed to join. If this war continues on its current trajectory, the question worth asking is not which superpower prevails, but how many other countries, currencies, and shipping lanes get quietly conscripted before it does.

Some constitutional settlements fail because they are unjust. Others fail because those who might have accepted them cease to trust one another before the settlement can take effect The failure of the Simla Conference did not persuade Britain to abandon the search for a united constitutional settlement. On the contrary, it convinced the newly elected Labour Government that another and far more comprehensive initiative had become indispensable. The Second World War had ended. Britain emerged victorious, but financially exhausted and politically transformed. The question confronting Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s government was no longer, whether India would become independent. Independence had become inevitable. The remaining question was whether it could be achieved without Partition. The responsibility for answering that question fell upon one of the most significant constitutional delegations ever sent to British India. In March 1946, the Cabinet Mission, comprising Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander, arrived in India with instructions not merely to negotiate the transfer of power but to devise a constitutional framework capable of reconciling profoundly different political aspirations within a single state.  Unlike earlier initiatives, the Cabinet Mission did not attempt to persuade one side to surrender its constitutional claims to another. Instead, it sought to construct a constitutional architecture that would allow competing visions of India to coexist. The Mission recognised two political realities that earlier proposals had struggled to reconcile. Indian National Congress continued to insist upon the unity of India, while the Muslim League maintained that Muslim political nationhood required constitutional recognition. The challenge lay in accommodating both principles without destroying either. The solution proposed by the Mission was both innovative and extraordinarily complex. It rejected the immediate creation of a sovereign Pakistan, arguing that Partition would generate formidable administrative, economic and strategic difficulties. At the same time, it acknowledged that an excessively centralised constitution would be unacceptable to the Muslim League. The Mission, therefore, proposed a three-tier constitutional structure. At the centre would stand a limited Union Government responsible only for defence, foreign affairs and communications, together with the finances necessary to discharge those functions. The provinces would retain extensive autonomy over most subjects of governance. Between these two levels, the provinces would form three groups reflecting geographical and political realities. Sections A, B and C would be empowered to frame constitutions for their respective groups while participating in the larger Union. The constitutional ingenuity of the proposal lay precisely in its attempt to preserve India’s international unity while recognising its internal diversity. Neither complete centralisation nor compl therefore sought a middle constitutional path. Congress interpreted the Plan as preserving the essential unity of India, though many of its leaders remained apprehensive that compulsory provincial grouping might weaken the authority of the future Union. The Muslim League initially accepted the proposal because the grouping arrangements appeared capable of protecting Muslim-majority provinces and preserving the possibility of greater autonomy in the future. For a brief moment, it appeared that a constitutional compromise acceptable to both major political parties had finally emerged. That moment proved remarkably short-lived. The difficulty did not lie primarily in the constitutional text. It lay in conflicting interpretations of the text. Congress regarded the provincial groupings as temporary arrangements that could subsequently be modified by elected provincial legislatures. The Muslim League regarded them as an essential constitutional guarantee protecting Muslim political autonomy. The same constitutional document, thus, came to embody fundamentally different expectations. The archival record preserved in the Transfer of Power volumes reveals that British officials themselves recognised this ambiguity. The Mission deliberately employed language capable of attracting acceptance from both Congress and the League. Diplomatic flexibility succeeded in producing initial agreement but left unresolved the deeper question of how the Constitution would actually operate once political power had been transferred. Ambiguity, which had previously served as an instrument of negotiation, now became a source of constitutional instability. The situation deteriorated further after Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking as President of the Congress, declared that the Constituent Assembly would remain sovereign in determining the future Constitution and would not regard itself as permanently bound by every aspect of the Cabinet Mission Plan. The Muslim League interpreted these remarks as evidence that the constitutional safeguards upon which it had relied could be altered after the transfer of power. Confidence rapidly evaporated. Muhammad Ali Jinnah responded by withdrawing the League’s earlier acceptance and announcing Direct Action. The constitutional conversation increasingly gave way to political confrontation. The tragic communal violence that followed profoundly altered the atmosphere in which constitutional negotiations continued. The Cabinet Mission nevertheless occupies a unique place in the constitutional history of South Asia. It represented the most sophisticated attempt to reconcile unity with diversity through constitutional design. It neither denied Muslim political aspirations nor abandoned the ideal of a united India. Instead, it sought to accommodate both within an asymmetrical federal structure unprecedented in British constitutional practice. Whether the Plan would ultimately have succeeded if fully implemented remains one of the most enduring questions in modern South Asian historiography. Historians continue to disagree. Some regard it as the last realistic opportunity to preserve Indian unity. Others argue that political distrust had already advanced too far for even the most carefully designed constitutional arrangement to survive. The documentary evidence suggests that the Mission came closer than any previous initiative to securing acceptance from both principal political organisations. Its collapse. Therefore, deserves to be understood not simply as another failed negotiation but as the moment when the possibility of a united constitutional future receded most dramatically. The tragedy of Partition was still not inevitable. The Indian Independence Act of 1947 had not yet been enacted, the boundaries of the future states had not been drawn, and constitutional alternatives technically remained available. Nevertheless, after the collapse of the Cabinet Mission, the political space for compromise contracted with alarming speed. The search for constitutional reconciliation increasingly yielded to preparations for constitutional separation. The next article examines the final phase of British rule under Lord Mountbatten. It explores how the acceleration of

I grew up in Rawalpindi Cantt, where my father served as the principal of St. Mary’s Cambridge High School. Though my professional journey has carried me across continents and I now reside in the United States, my heart beats unyielding rhythm with the 260 million Pakistanis who are my true country fellows. Every night in my dreams, I walk the familiar streets of Rawalpindi. I graduated from Islamabad Model College, and to this day, the majestic Margalla Hills grace the screen of my laptop as a constant reminder of home. As a young student, I stood with pride to sing our National Anthem: “Pak sar zamin shaad bad, Kishwar-e-hasin shad bad, Tu nishaan-e-azm-e-ali shaan, Arz-e-Pakistan! Markaz-e-yaqin shaad bad.” That sacred pledge of resolve, faith, and devotion remains embedded in my soul, driving my lifelong conviction in the destiny of our homeland. Over a professional career spanning three decades across Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, and Russia, I have observed the mechanics of statecraft, economic transformation, and human capital under diverse political systems. Through these global experiences, one reality has become undeniably clear: the Pakistani nation possesses an extraordinary, high-caliber intellectual capacity that matches—and frequently surpasses—the finest minds anywhere in the world. From the scientific and medical sectors in Europe to the dynamic technology ecosystems of the United States, Pakistani professionals consistently perform at the highest echelons of innovation, corporate leadership, medicine, engineering, and public service. United States Presidents have repeatedly and publicly commended the invaluable contributions of the vibrant Pakistani diaspora to American infrastructure, economic vitality, and technological advancement. When placed within transparent, rule-of-law-based systems, Pakistani talent routinely excels. The foundational problem facing Pakistan today is not a deficit of human intelligence or natural resources, but a deep-seated structural crisis within its governing institutions. The primary obstacle preventing Pakistan from realizing its true global standing is systemic corruption, the deliberate destruction of meritocracy, and a reckless deficit of vision among its political leadership. For decades, the national political landscape has been dominated by self-serving figures who lack both statesmanship and the basic literacy required to navigate the twenty-first century. We live in an era defined by artificial intelligence, digital economies, and high-tech governance, yet the traditional political leadership remains largely ignorant of technologies like AI, machine learning, and modern public administration. Their approach to power focuses heavily on short-term patronage, wealth accumulation, and personal preservation, while ignoring the core developmental needs of the population. This total lack of strategic vision directly fuels the socio-political unrest observed across key regions, including Azad Jammu & Kashmir, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The grievances in these areas are fundamentally economic and administrative, born from decades of neglect, broken promises, and predatory governance. Greedy political elites have consistently exploited local resources and suppressed institutional development, leaving local populations disenfranchised and impoverished. When regional populations are denied basic justice, modern infrastructure, quality education, and economic dignity, instability naturally follows. The issues facing these provinces cannot be resolved through superficial political arrangements or force alone. They demand genuine administrative devolution, economic fairness, and an absolute end to elite political exploitation. Pakistan’s growing population, rapid urbanization, and regional economic disparities further justify a serious evaluation of its overall administrative structure. Creating smaller, manageable administrative units or new provinces can bring government directly to the people. However, redrawing boundaries alone is not a magic solution. If corrupt practices, political interference, and weak institutional capacity persist, new administrative divisions will only multiply secretariats, ministries, and state expenditures without improving the daily lives of citizens. Any restructuring must be guided by objective criteria, rigorous economic planning, and transparent public participation, ensuring that power shifts completely down to local municipal and union council levels. To break the longstanding cycle of administrative decay, Pakistan requires an aggressive shift in its approach to governance and elite accountability. The country must adopt an uncompromising strategy similar to the Saudi Arabia model initiated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS)—a decisive, systemic crackdown on institutional corruption and elite financial impunity. Every asset, real estate portfolio, and offshore account illegally acquired abroad by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, and public officials must be systematically traced, frozen, and confiscated under international legal frameworks. Returning these stolen billions to the national treasury is not merely a moral imperative; it is an urgent economic necessity. A nation cannot thrive while its financial reserves are continuously drained to fund luxury lifestyles in foreign capitals. Achieving financial integrity and self-reliance is the essential prerequisite for building true national strength. History demonstrates that economic power is the absolute mother of military power and national sovereignty. No state can maintain a robust, modern defense apparatus over the long term without a self-sustaining economy, a strong currency, and a productive technological base. By recovering looted public wealth and redirecting it toward national infrastructure, energy independence, industrial output, and digital education, Pakistan can rapidly eliminate its dependence on foreign debt and assert its sovereignty on the global stage. True economic independence grants a nation unyielding leverage in international affairs. The path forward demands an urgent transition to AI-driven good governance and digital administration. Human discretion in public procurement, land record management, tax collection, customs clearance, and civil service recruitment must be systematically replaced with automated, algorithmic systems that eliminate bribery and political patronage. Artificial intelligence platforms can optimize public spending, track state resource distribution in real time, monitor civic projects, and guarantee complete transparency across every tier of government. When civil service recruitment, performance evaluations, and judicial tracking are governed by objective data frameworks rather than political influence, absolute meritocracy will return to state institutions. Furthermore, national development requires a structured investment in human capital. Establishing dedicated leadership academies and technical institutes will ensure that the next generation of public administrators is versed in high-tech policy design, data analytics, global trade dynamics, and financial management. Nations such as Singapore, South Korea, Estonia, and Rwanda have proven that rapid transformation does not require unlimited natural wealth. It demands disciplined execution, unyielding meritocracy, technologically integrated institutions, and transparent leadership.

Quite surely and certainly, Pakistan’s youth are our greatest national asset and, more importantly, the foundation of the country’s future growth. With nearly 70 percent of Pakistan’s total population below the age of 30, making the much required investment as such was not only a social responsibility but also an economic necessity. Visionary Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif’s focus was centred on productive employment, empowering Pakistani youth to become job creators instead of job seekers. Under his leadership and guidance, youth empowerment has been placed at the centre of the Federal Government’s development agenda. According to the relevant facts and figures in this regard available from the official sources concerned, the Federal Budget for the just commenced new financial year 2026-27 duly reflects this commitment through the largest-ever investment in Pakistan’s youth development, as Rs 40.58 billion have been directly allocated for the Prime Minister’s Youth Programme initiatives. Additionally, Rs 21 billion have also been provided for the implementation of a number of youth-focused programmes by various ministries/divisions of the Federal Government. Such a huge allocation in the new federal budget for youth development quite obviously reflects the Federal Government’s determination to provide young Pakistanis with equal opportunities in education, skills development, entrepreneurship, innovation, sports, and leadership. Federal budget allocations will hopefully further strengthen youth participation in national development. The Federal Government is in the process of building an ecosystem where young Pakistanis can create businesses, generate employment, and contribute to economic growth. This appreciable ecosystem is being built through productive employment initiatives, entrepreneurship support, skills development, and easy and comfortable access to financial resources. The youth-focused prioritized areas in the federal budget directly impacting the future of Pakistan’s young population included allocation of Rs 22.4 billion for the PM’s Youth Business & Agriculture Loan Scheme for promoting entrepreneurship and economic independence; Rs 9.9 billion for the Youth Skills Development Programme to provide market-driven technical and digital skills; Rs 3 billion for the Pakistan Education Endowment Fund for supporting talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds; another Rs 3.00 billion for IT Startups and Venture Capital support for accelerating Pakistan’s digital economy; Rs 700.00 million for Youth Development Centres; Rs 500.00 million for the Talent Hunt Youth Sports League; Rs 400.00 million for the National Volunteer Corps; Rs 300.00 million for E-Sports Arenas and Training Centres; Rs 250.00 million for National Innovation Awards; and Rs 50.00 million for the Green Youth Movement. Additionally, Rs 24.48 billion have also been allocated for expansion of the Daanish Schools Network across the country for improving access to quality education. Recognizing the fast emerging fact that the modern global economy rewards skills, innovation, and adaptability, the Federal Government has also allocated more than Rs 9.9 billion for technical, digital, and professional skills development under the PM Youth Programmes. Young Pakistanis are being trained through the Youth Skills Development Programme in fast emerging technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, data science, and other high-demand sectors, along with traditional trades aligned with market needs. The objective is to bridge the gap between education and employment and to prepare the youth to avail and explore opportunities both within Pakistan and in foreign countries around the globe. The PM’s Youth Business & Agriculture Loan Scheme duly represents the Federal Government’s commitment to ensure entrepreneurship-led growth. Through provision of interest-free and low-markup financing, the scheme is enabling young Pakistanis to establish their own businesses, expand agricultural ventures, launch startups, and become employers. This is an ongoing initiative which has demonstrated quite significant impact, as till now Rs 365.5 billion have been disbursed to over 625,740 borrowers, which has contributed to the creation of nearly 1.96 million jobs. It is pertinent to mention here that while it is hoped that funds will be allocated for the continuation of the scheme during financial year 2026-27 in an impressive and progressive manner, thereby further strengthening entrepreneurship, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), agriculture, and innovation, quite appreciably a 25 percent quota has been reserved for women to ensure that young women also have equal access to financing and economic opportunities. The PM’s Youth Laptop Scheme is also an ongoing initiative under which six lakh laptops have so far been distributed among talented students across Pakistan. Under its Phase-IV, another one lakh laptops are being distributed. In the next phase, PM’s Chromebooks will be distributed to students nationwide, including those hailing from underserved and grassroots communities, in order to further enhance digital learning opportunities. Digital transformation is a key priority of the Federal Government’s youth development agenda. The PM’s Digital Youth Hub is Pakistan’s first national youth platform for connecting young people with opportunities across the PM’s Youth Programmes and the 4Es Framework, including education, employment, scholarships, internships, entrepreneurship, and technology. With already more than 800,000 registered users, over 16 million downloads, and over 114,000 job listings, the platform is ensuring transparent and merit-based opportunities. Sports development is another priority of the Federal Government. More than 300,000 young athletes have already so far participated in the PM’s Youth Talent Identification activities. The Federal Government is expanding sports disciplines from 12 to 23 while also establishing professional facilities. The approval of Pakistan’s first National E-Sports Policy in the very near future will further open opportunities in the rapidly growing global digital entertainment industry. Furthermore, the National Youth Employment Policy aims to create sustainable employment opportunities for Pakistan’s youth, including 32.4 million NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) youth, by aligning skills development with market demands and high-growth sectors. The policy commendably focuses on youth entrepreneurship, workforce readiness, digital skills, and expanding access to decent employment opportunities, with a target of achieving 100 percent absorption of new labour-force entrants by 2030 and also increasing female labour force participation to 35 percent. Further, the National Adolescent & Youth Policy empowers Pakistan’s youth aged 10-29 years through education, skills development, employment, health, and social inclusion. The policy has been developed through consultations with 50/60 thousand youth across 40+ cities and provides a framework for youth development and nation-building.