Pakistan’s ‘battery revolution’ needs market…

By Engineer Arshad Hameed Abbasi, International Energy, Climate Change and Water Security Practitioner and Engineer Idrees Abbasi, Former Consultant, World Bank,  and Mr. Amjad Butt, Writer; Secretary General, Murree Literary Council, resident of [address].    There is a particular kind of grief in watching an institution outlive its usefulness while still drawing a salary, still cutting ribbons, still issuing degrees that mean less each year they are printed. That is where Pakistan’s higher education system stands today, and it is time someone said so plainly: the paradigm has already shifted, quietly, without anyone in Islamabad’s marble offices noticing. It shifted on YouTube, on TED, on edX and Udemy and Khan Academy, in a thousand free lecture halls that never asked a single Pakistani student for tuition, a hostel fee, or four years of their life. The only people who have not caught up are the ones still running the old one. There is a particular kind of grief in watching an institution outlive its usefulness while still drawing a salary, still cutting ribbons, still issuing degrees that mean less each year they are printed. That is where Pakistan’s higher education system stands today, and it is time someone said so plainly: the paradigm has already shifted, quietly, without anyone in Islamabad’s marble offices noticing. It shifted on YouTube, on TED, on edX and Udemy and Khan Academy, in a thousand free lecture halls that never asked a single Pakistani student for tuition, a hostel fee, or four years of their life. The only people who have not caught up are the ones still running the old one. For decades, the deal offered to a Pakistani student was simple: surrender your time, your family’s savings, and your twenties to a physical campus, and in exchange receive knowledge you could not get anywhere else. That deal is dead. A seventeen-year-old with a smartphone and a working internet connection can now watch a Nobel laureate explain quantum mechanics, follow a structural engineer walk through a seismic design calculation line by line, or sit in on a Stanford lecture on macroeconomics — all free, all on demand, all taught by people who are, in most cases, simply better at their subject than the men and women drawing a professor’s salary in the classroom down the road. The tragedy is not that this content exists. The tragedy is that almost no one in a position of authority ever told the students it was there. For decades, the deal offered to a Pakistani student was simple: surrender your time, your family’s savings, and your twenties to a physical campus, and in exchange receive knowledge you could not get anywhere else. That deal is dead. A seventeen-year-old with a smartphone and a working internet connection can now watch a Nobel laureate explain quantum mechanics, follow a structural engineer walk through a seismic design calculation line by line, or sit in on a Stanford lecture on macroeconomics — all free, all on demand, all taught by people who are, in most cases, simply better at their subject than the men and women drawing a professor’s salary in the classroom down the road. The tragedy is not that this content exists. The tragedy is that almost no one in a position of authority ever told the students it was there. Ask yourself honestly: when was the last time a Vice Chancellor stood in front of a first-year class and said, “Before you trust anything I teach you, go watch the version of this lecture that MIT put online for free, and come back and tell me if I taught it better”? It has not happened, and it will not happen, because the entire architecture of Pakistani higher education depends on students not asking that question. It depends on the fiction that a degree is the same thing as an education, that a seat in a lecture hall for four years is the same thing as understanding, and that an institution’s worth can be measured in acres of campus rather than in what a graduate can actually do when the exam is over and the job begins.Ask yourself honestly: when was the last time a Vice Chancellor stood in front of a first-year class and said, “Before you trust anything I teach you, go watch the version of this lecture that MIT put online for free, and come back and tell me if I taught it better”? It has not happened, and it will not happen, because the entire architecture of Pakistani higher education depends on students not asking that question. It depends on the fiction that a degree is the same thing as an education, that a seat in a lecture hall for four years is the same thing as understanding, and that an institution’s worth can be measured in acres of campus rather than in what a graduate can actually do when the exam is over and the job begins. We do not need to guess what an alternative looks like, because the world has already built it. Universities that were once measured by the size of their footprint are now measured by the depth of their content and the reach of their delivery. Institutions like the National University of Singapore have shown that a compact, space-efficient campus married to serious digital delivery outperforms sprawling, underused infrastructure every time. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, students still find themselves inside partially built mega-campuses, sitting in half-used lecture halls, being taught by professors whose most recent research contribution was a maintenance grant, while the actual global classroom — free, current, taught by the best minds alive — sits one browser tab away, untouched, unmentioned, unrecommended by the very people whose job it was to point students toward it.We do not need to guess what an alternative looks like, because the world has already built it. Universities that were once measured by the size of their footprint are now measured by the depth of their content and the reach of their delivery.

July 26th marks the birthday of an political prisoner who spend 1.5 decade in prison without conviction meaning he was innocent but was kept in prison unlawfully. But from prison torture cell he stood by the state. He is son of soil. His non-violent legacy is worth following by all political prisoners of world. This is the beauty of the modern world era that you can not hide anything from anyone. Welcome to present world best known as modern world era. This s all about technology and methods of gathering information compiling it and ultimately relaying it in more authenticated way. It took decades to evolve technology from computing, internet, gadgets and mobile revolution to the present world modern world era of artificial intelligence. Gen Z and Gen Alpha highly rely on AI tools. If you go through Google and AI tools and start searching term ‘political prisoners’ then you will find incumbent President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari as the one and only political prisoner in the history of world, who spent fourteen years and eight months in prison without any conviction. His tongue was cut and botched attempt was made to cut his neck and throat to kill him. He faced worst third degree torture in prison. He never gave a single call to his party workers to protest or attack the institutes. In 1990s and onwards United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) and Tokyo declaration were in place for necessary remedial but kudos to Asif Ali Zardari, he never opt for agitation. Asif Ali Zardari faced all kinds of tortures with patience and bravery and stood by the state of Pakistan under any circumstances, even when his wife two-times prime minister of Pakistan was assassinated in broad daylight in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007, he gave he hope to nation ‘Pakistan Khappay’ Pakistan Zindabad Pakistan long live. He pledged that He with help of people of Pakistan and state institutions will make greater and stronger Pakistan. In 2008, when Asif Ali Zardari, assumed the charge of Presidency, he forgave all of his enemies and he announced general amnesty for all, in fact he also took initiatives to stop unfair and degrading treatment and third degree torture with others which he faced during his imprisonment. In year 2010, The President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, ratified the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and later it was his political party Pakistan Peoples Party which brought legislation Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Act, 2022 to prohibit torture and other acts of cruel, Inhumane and degrading treatment. In year, 2023, It was also Sindh assembly/government to bring the legislation of the medico legal Act 2023. In his previous tenure of Presidency (2008-2013). He saved world from nuclear war in the wake of Mumbai attacks, strengthened ties with china and ensured revival of ties with Russia and Iran and started new era of relations with US and west on the grounds of equality as good friends. And his current tenure of Presidency is more vibrant and productive for people of Pakistan coupled with iron first lady Aseefa Bhutto Zardari’s input. Under his visionary leadership Pakistan is heading towards his dream of Greater Pakistan. May his 71st birthday bring Pakistan prosperity, peace and hub of global economy. Happy birthday Asian Nelson Mandela!

These days, one phrase echoes throughout our country: “Pakistan’s system has collapsed.” If we translate the word collapse into plain, colloquial language, it means that our so-called system has completely broken down, gone to ruin, or become utterly dysfunctional. Therefore, the argument goes, the country now needs a new system. This, they claim, can only happen if, instead of the existing four provinces, Pakistan is reorganized into thirty or thirty-two new provinces. Such a restructuring, they believe, would push aside the traditional politicians and allow a new generation of political leaders to emerge. Otherwise, they warn, just as in India, there will be an uprising of the “cockroaches”—that is, the youth—which will force this collapsed, rotten system to surrender. At first glance, these words appear attractive and appealing. They express not only frustration and disgust with our current political situation but also offer hope to the younger generation, particularly Generation Z. It is as if they are saying: “Dear frustrated young people! We are opening the doors to your future. You will rise, dominate the scene, and sweep away all the debris of the past—that is, the traditional politicians—with the force of your determination and enthusiasm.” However, this humble writer sees, behind these beautiful words, not a bright future but the same worn-out and ugly mirage of the past. In reality, those who are truly responsible—the real culprits—cleverly distance themselves from blame, divert the attention of the youth toward others, and then present themselves as the young people’s sympathizers and supporters. In our poetry, it is through such tricks that the beloved murderer becomes an innocent beloved, and the criminal appears as the trusted confidant. But this humble writer calls it what it really is: “the thief making the loudest outcry.” Our national poet, Iqbal, once wrote: There is an outcry that Muslims have vanished from the world; We ask: Were true Muslims ever really present? In appearance you resemble Christians, in civilization the Hindus; These are the Muslims before whom even the Jews would feel ashamed. If, in today’s circumstances, you replace the word “Muslims” with “system,” the verses take on a striking new meaning: There is an outcry that the system has vanished from the country; We ask: Was there ever really a system to begin with? If we were to parody the remaining verses, they might be difficult for some to digest. Suffice it to say that those in power never truly allowed a genuine system to develop here. And whenever, after much struggle, some semblance of a system did emerge, there were always certain “respectable gentlemen” who seemed to have taken an invisible oath—or perhaps a vow of deliberate silence—that it must never be allowed to function. In the eyes of this humble writer, our system truly collapsed on 16 August 1946, when, under the guidance of the British establishment, the Direct Action Day was observed, reducing the foundations of any future system to rubble. From that point onward, the struggle was no longer for a functioning system but for personal rule. That struggle strangled democracy, human rights, liberty, and freedom, and instead built a grand highway of coercion and dictatorship. Anyone who dared to step off that path or disagree with it was labeled a traitor, an enemy of the nation, an Indian agent, or part of the so-called “Fitna-e-Hind” (the Indian conspiracy). These labels were then applied to whomever those in power wished. The first victim was Dr. Khan Sahib’s democratically elected provincial government in the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), which was dismissed within the very first week. Soon afterward, the same authoritarian mentality struck the government of Ayub Khuhro in Sindh. It was also decided that any cabinet member who failed to say “Yes, Sir” to the Governor-General would be considered dispensable. Once the founding generation established such principles of governance, why would later generations lag behind in following them? Thereafter, the race for personal power was inevitable. In the end, victory was bound to go to whoever possessed the greater force—whether the power of the stick or the gun. How could it be otherwise? If, instead of making the Constitution and the rule of law your source of authority, you rely on personal superiority, intimidation, prestige, and the power of office, then someone carrying a gun will inevitably dominate the throne of personal power. And once that happens, the cycle simply continues. It is a law of nature that the bigger fish eats the smaller fish. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Ghulam Muhammad, and Iskander Mirza all played their respective roles. Later, when greater power confronted lesser power, the result was the rise of powerful military rulers such as Ayub Khan, Agha Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and Qamar Javed Bajwa. (To be continued)

Foreign funding. Say those two words anywhere in Pakistan and watch the room go quiet. Say them in India this week and watch a whole government minister lose his job. Funny how the same phrase behaves so differently depending on which side of the border it lands on. Let us start with what happened in Delhi. Young people gathered under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party. They protested against paper leaks in the NEET medical entrance exam. Police used batons. Some Indian voices claimed the protest was foreign funded, blaming Pakistan and mysterious outside money. Delhi police blocked hundreds of social media accounts linked to Pakistan, saying they were spreading a misleading campaign. A court petition even asked for an investigation into whether the protest was part of a larger foreign conspiracy. The protesters denied all of it. They said the movement began with more than two million students whose futures were shaken by exam irregularities. Political analysts backed them up too, saying the foreign conspiracy story gets pulled out every time young Indians get loud, whether it was the farmers’ movement or the citizenship law protests. This time the story did not stick. Even people inside the ruling party joined the protest, so the usual blame game lost its bite. Now bring the mirror to Pakistan. Here too, foreign funding is the favourite accusation of anyone who wants a protest silenced without answering its actual questions. And here, a special category exists. Indian funding and Jewish funding are treated like radioactive material. Mention either one, proven or not, and the conversation stops being about exam leaks or student rights and becomes about loyalty and conspiracy instead. It is a convenient trick. It lets institutions avoid explaining themselves. So here is the honest question worth sitting with. Where are our own protests? Cambridge examination papers, the ones sat by thousands of O and A Level students across Pakistan, have leaked multiple times in recent memory. Multiple times. Not once, not by accident, but repeatedly. And what followed? No sustained protest. No serious public inquiry that anyone can point to. No Jantar Mantar moment. Students who spent months preparing, whose merit and hard work were undercut by a leaked paper, largely absorbed the unfairness and moved on. Compare that to young Indians who stayed on the streets for ten straight days facing tear gas until a minister resigned. Then there is the PMDC advertisement mess, freshly reported by Minute Mirror. The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council published a public notice meant to guide students planning to study medicine abroad. Instead of guiding them, it confused them. The wording suggested that every Pakistani student headed abroad, even to Harvard or Cambridge, needed to clear the MDCAT exam first. Senator Anusha Rahman raised the alarm in a Senate committee meeting, pointing out that thousands of students aiming for universities in the UK, US, Canada and Australia were left anxious over a rule that turned out not to apply to them the way the advertisement implied. The PMDC president eventually admitted the wording needed review, and that the requirement was actually meant only for specific cases involving certain university rankings or flagged countries. A body meant to protect students ended up frightening them through careless drafting. And still, no march. No sit-in. No sustained public pressure demanding accountability for a mistake that could have derailed real academic plans. Indian students proved something important this week. Persistent, peaceful pressure can still move a government, even one that prefers to change the subject with conspiracy theories. Pakistani students have every reason to ask themselves why similar failures at home, paper leaks, unclear MDCAT policy, confusing regulatory advertisements, are met with silence instead of the same organised anger.

I have a confession to make before I make an argument: I am not a neutral observer of Uzbekistan, and I have never pretended to be. My grandmother was born in Bukhara, and something of that inheritance has stayed with me my whole life, quietly, the way a language half-learned in childhood never fully leaves you. When I finally visited Uzbekistan as an adult, I did not feel like a foreign visitor taking in unfamiliar streets. I felt something closer to what my grandmother must have felt looking at me — an unearned, uncomplicated warmth that asked nothing in return. I have come to understand that feeling as the quiet, private secret of belonging to a place through blood rather than through a passport. Tashkent is, in every way that matters to me, my second home. It was in that spirit, long before he held the office he holds today, that I once had the chance to meet and listen to Shavkat Mirziyoyev. He was not yet President of Uzbekistan when I encountered him, and I remember being struck less by any title he carried than by the scale of what he was already thinking about out loud: an economic vision that did not stop at Uzbekistan’s borders, a water and energy strategy built for the whole of Central Asia, and a sense — unusual in a region that had spent decades looking inward — that Uzbekistan’s future was inseparable from the future of its neighbors, and ultimately from the future of Asia itself. I did not know, at the time, that I was listening to a future head of state. I knew only that I was listening to someone thinking at a scale most officials never attempt. That background should not surprise anyone who looks closely at his biography. Mirziyoyev is, by training, an irrigation engineer. He graduated in 1981 from the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Melioration with a degree in mechanical engineering, and went on to earn a doctorate in technical sciences — a foundation in water management and applied engineering, not in the abstractions of political theory. I find something quietly reassuring in that. A leader who has spent his formative years thinking about the physical realities of water — how it moves, where it is wasted, how a system either functions or fails on the ground — tends to bring a different discipline to the running of a country than one who has only ever studied power itself. When he took the presidential oath on 14 December 2016, he inherited a country that had spent decades in careful, deliberate isolation under his predecessor, Islam Karimov. What he has built since is, by any honest measure, one of the most consequential transformations Central Asia has seen in a generation. Mirziyoyev dismantled that isolation almost immediately. Borders that had been tense and heavily restricted with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were resolved through negotiation rather than standoff. Trade and cross-border travel, once treated with suspicion, were opened. And rather than settling for improved bilateral relations, he proposed something more ambitious still: formalizing the informal annual summits among Central Asian leaders into a standing “Community of Central Asia,” with a rotating presidency and a permanent secretariat, built around shared trade, water management, transport infrastructure, and coordinated engagement with Afghanistan. It is the kind of regional architecture Central Asia lacked for the entire post-Soviet period, and it is very hard to picture it emerging under any of his predecessors. The economic numbers now validate what, in that early conversation, still sounded like ambition rather than achievement. Uzbekistan implemented $43.1 billion in foreign investment in its most recent reporting period, of which $38.2 billion arrived as foreign direct investment — a 24 % surge over the prior year, and enough to make Uzbekistan the largest recipient of accumulated FDI stock in Central Asia, ahead of Kazakhstan. FDI absorption climbed from $19.5 billion in 2023 to $31.9 billion in 2024 before reaching this year’s historic peak, with a single record quarter bringing in $1.7 billion in net balance-of-payments inflows. China remains the leading investor at $17.1 billion, followed by Russia at $4.8 billion, with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Germany, the UAE, and the United Kingdom all expanding their footprints. The capital is not concentrated in one sector either: energy and renewables lead at $7.1 billion, including ACWA Power’s $2.4 billion wind installation in Karakalpakstan, alongside major investment in agriculture, construction, and mining. The country’s foreign reserves stood at roughly $63.75 billion as of June 2026, after peaking above $77 billion earlier in the year, while real GDP grew 7.7 % in 2025 and is projected to hold near 6.8 % through 2026. None of this happened by accident. Uzbekistan built nearly a thousand Free Economic Zones offering genuine tax relief and simplified customs. It collapsed business registration into a single electronic government portal, cutting the cost of starting a company to roughly $27. It fully liberalized its currency and removed the foreign exchange barriers that once made profit repatriation a genuine deterrent to investors. This is not a country hoping investors will come. It is a country that examined, line by line, every friction that had historically kept them away, and removed it. But the achievement I find most remarkable is geographic, because geography is the one obstacle policy alone usually cannot solve. Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries on Earth — a nation whose neighbors are themselves landlocked, placing it about as far from open water as any country can be. For most of its history, that was treated as a permanent constraint. Mirziyoyev has instead treated it as an engineering problem to be solved, which is precisely how an irrigation engineer would see it. The Trans-Afghan Railway, first proposed by Uzbekistan in 2018 and finally formalized in a trilateral framework agreement signed with Afghanistan and Pakistan in July 2025, will run roughly 650 kilometres from Termez on the Uzbek border through Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, and Logar, crossing into Pakistan

By Ahmad Hassan “The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other… Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: ‘I feed on your energy.’” When Frank Herbert wrote those words in his novel Dune Messiah, he observed that elaborate euphemisms are often used by the state to conceal the raw mechanics of power. In Pakistan, August 5 is observed as Youm-e-Istehsal to condemn the 2019 revocation of Article 370 and its supplementary provision, Article 35A. This act of the Indian government removed Kashmir’s separate constitution, its flag and its control over its own affairs. Last week marked seven years since that day. What began as a dramatic constitutional rupture has now, by design, become quietly normalized. Jammu and Kashmir joined India in 1947 on defined terms. The Maharaja handed over defence, foreign affairs and communications. Everything else stayed with the state. The United Nations later called for a plebiscite. It never happened. Instead, over decades, the protections that were supposed to stand in its place were worn down piece by piece, until August 5, 2019, when the government removed what remained in a single stroke. The method deserves more attention than it usually gets. Article 370 was not directly changed. First, the government reached for Article 367, which was intended to aid in the interpretation of the Constitution, and used it to redefine one phrase: “Constituent Assembly” became “Legislative Assembly.” Kashmir had no sitting assembly at the time, and the state was under President’s Rule. So, the government’s own appointee, the Governor, signed off on the change. India’s Supreme Court had already ruled, in 1959 and again in 1969, that Kashmir’s constitutional status could only be changed after the approval of the Constituent Assembly of Kashmir. When that body no longer existed, no institution had the standing to give that consent on Kashmir’s behalf. New Delhi decided that its own Governor could stand in for the people he had not been elected by. That is not consent. It is a government consenting to itself. The Indian government argued that Kashmiris had lived for decades under an insurgency that killed tens of thousands and emptied the Valley of its Pandit community in 1990. It left the region isolated from the investment and policing coordination. That argument would carry more weight if the method had matched it. What followed the revocation was not the language of integration. It was a total communications blackout, landlines and mobile networks and the internet all cut at once. Independent estimates put the troop presence at 600,000 to 800,000, roughly one soldier for every ten Kashmiris. Even pro-India politicians, former chief ministers among them, were placed under detention. Perhaps a security argument can justify counter-insurgency operations. It cannot by itself justify dissolving a state’s constitutional status, its legislature and its statehood in one move. That too with no elected Kashmiri voice given the chance to object. Jawaharlal Nehru warned Parliament about exactly this shortcut in 1952, while Article 370 was still being drafted. No clause in a constitution, he said, could substitute for the will of the Kashmiri people. Real integration, in his words, comes from the mind and the heart, not from a clause imposed from outside. Actually, there is a longer, quieter project behind the legal manoeuvre. Article 35A once barred outsiders from buying land or settling permanently in Kashmir. Since its removal, more than 3.2 million domicile certificates have gone to outsiders, most of them non-Kashmiri Hindus. This alarming thing is that wherever a disputed territory’s demographics are reshaped before its people are asked what they want, the eventual vote, if one ever comes, no longer reflects the population whose future was originally in question. None of this required an invading army, or an open declaration of intent. It required a redefined word, a signature from an appointee, and a great deal of time. The convoluted legalisms that Herbert warned about have become policy in Kashmir: development, integration, correction. Each euphemism has quietly done the work that an honest admission of purpose could never have achieved. Seven years on, Kashmir’s assembly has voted decisively against the BJP that carried out the revocation, and passed its own resolution demanding the restoration of its special status. New Delhi can easily ignore them. Yet, that very power to ignore an elected legislature proves, beyond any doubt, that the “consent” obtained seven years ago was always a legal fiction