Rebuilding Hope Through Resilient Schools in Sindh

A couple of years back I was travelling from Karachi to Lahore after visiting some research institutions. The person sitting next to me was a federal minister. He asked me if I had been to the museum at Mohenjo Daro and seen the bullock cart on display there. To this day, the same cart is being used in the villages of Sindh with hardly any upgradation or improvement. His remarks were startling. Despite our advancements and research, the ground realities remain grim in the land of the pure. As a child growing up on the Mall very close to the Punjab University Old Campus, I have fond memories of real-time research being carried out by our scientists. Dr Niaz Ahmed, Director, Institute of Chemical Engineering and Technology, worked around the clock to upgrade the Kalabagh Iron deposits. He developed the Tanvir-Niaz process to extract iron from a low-grade deposit. Next door in Government College was Dr Sultan, the biologist, sitting on his charpoy working late hours. Dr Nazir Ahmed, the famous zoologist who rose to be the principal of the esteemed institution, worked in the zoological gardens of the college next to the zoo on the Mall. Dr Rafi Chaudhry established the first High Tension Physics laboratory in Asia. Dr Abdul Salam, the Nobel Laureate, was his student. The University of Agriculture was not too far behind, transferring its research to the farmers through its extension program. Slowly but surely, the republic was working towards technological self-reliance and food self-sufficiency. There was no external debt. By and large, corruption was contained. Institutions were strong. Order prevailed in the country. The founding fathers understood their responsibilities towards nation building. Despite initial hiccups, the nation remained on track. Through PIDC (Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation), steel was produced from the Kalabagh iron ore using the German Krupp-Renn process. A pilot plant was set up at the site to first upgrade the ore, followed by its conversion to steel. For demonstration purposes, VW cars were produced from this steel. The brilliant engineer C.M. Latif, whom I consider to be the Tata of Pakistan, established BECO (Batala Engineering Company), which was ahead of its time. Comrade Chou-En-Lai visited the plant in Kot Lakhpat during his visit to Pakistan in the early sixties. Both BECO and Ittefaq Foundry were nationalized in the seventies. The government of Zia-ul-Haq decided to denationalize both. While Ittefaq (LEFO then) was handed over to the Sharifs totally free of financial liabilities, BECO (PECO then) was not given this option. C.M. Latif refused to accept the liabilities. The Sharifs sold the land of the foundry, while PECO still stands there as a liability instead of an asset, which at one time it was. It is widely believed that the people of Pakistan are very innovative. A term “Jugaad” is used, which means to find a desi, out-of-the-box solution with minimal resources. In my personal experience, I have interacted with very able ‘Mistris’ (technicians) and theoretically able engineers and scientists who work well on paper but with limited practical application. The link between the hands and the mind is not there. Nations rise by applying their indigenous know-how. Technology is the strongest resource of our times, and its advancement and commercialization hold the key. For self-sufficiency in food, the manufacturing of agri-equipment at Daska needs technological advancement to mechanize the farms. A few years back, PAEC (Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission) developed laser land levelers for better utilization of water. The technology could have reached the farmers through Daska, but it did not. Orders have started to pour in for our armaments, which is a good sign, but massive re-organization with commercial discipline will be required for maximum utilization of the huge investments (around $20 billion) in this sector. There is a famous American saying: “The test of rubber is when it hits the road.” Similarly, the test of innovation is when it sells in the marketplace; otherwise, it remains an intellectual curiosity only, which developing nations cannot afford.

The original 1973 Constitution, Charter of Democracy (COD), and the landmark 18th Amendment all call for a strong local government system. Till today, it remains the unfinished agenda of good governance. It is key to the modernization of the state, society, and politics. The consensual Constitution was a miracle and a masterstroke of the elected government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (ZAB). Devolution was a cornerstone of this document, so painfully drafted by elected representatives of the people. As the newly created provinces after the break-up of the infamous One Unit lacked the capacity to handle vital areas like education, health, and agriculture, a concurrent list was prepared to devolve these departments systematically to the provincial governments. A Department of Provincial Coordination was created to oversee this transfer from Islamabad to Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta. Unfortunately, after the fall of the government in July 1977, the entire process was stalled. Governments that followed did not take this transfer seriously, resulting in serious governance issues. The two mainstream political parties of the time, PPP and PML-N, followed with the COD in May 2006, in which it was agreed to build an effective local government system. Unfortunately, after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the driving force behind the Charter, it was not fully adhered to. Instead, the 18th Amendment was passed by the legislature in April 2010 to restore the original document. Through this constitutional clean-up, Islamabad was cut to size while power and resources were handed over to the provincial governments, with the hope that they would be devolved all the way down to the tehsil and union council levels. But that did not take place. While the federal government was depleted, the provinces grew fat and started indulging in frivolous projects. In Punjab, Lahore was developed as a flagship showcase project for publicity while the rest of the province was left to languish. Karachi was ignored; resources were moved inland by the provincial government. The menace of incompetence, corruption, and abuse of authority has to be addressed at the national level before it is devolved; otherwise, it will be more of the same. The Civil Secretariat in Lahore, also called Lat Sahib Ka Daftar, which runs the largest province of the federation, reveals it all. Office hours are not observed; files do not move without wheels; records are poorly managed. There was a time when the Chief Minister resided only in GOR-I on Club Road, while official work was carried out at the Secretariat, but not anymore. Most senior officers (Chief Secretary, Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner, etc.) have established home offices, resulting in duplication and waste. Till the decade of the 1970s, only the telephone operator and one coordinator manned most official residences, but not anymore. Great Britain ruled the world with its Commissioners System. The only difference was that there was civilian oversight and accountability by the British Parliament, which has faded over time in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (IRP). Till today, the flag is unfurled at the office and residence of the Deputy Commissioner (DC), as representative of the Crown with sovereign powers (administrative, judicial, and revenue). Over the years, some judicial powers have been taken away; otherwise, the DC runs the district while the Commissioner controls the division. Recently, in Lahore, the Commissioner’s office was moved from the Sanda area to the Mall, across from Aitchison College. It is a fancy structure right on the main artery of the city, where millions have been spent on refurbishing the building vacated by the Naval Staff College, which was established close to the waters of the Lahore Canal. Perhaps it has been moved to the BRB waters now. One office move has strained the budget of the province. What will happen if scores of such infrastructures are built for new provincial governments? Growing up on the Mall, close to the Town Hall (Lahore Municipal Corporation, now Metropolitan Corporation of Lahore), my memory is of a functional city run by an elected mayor. Today, the metropolis is non-functional as it is under the control of the bureaucracy instead of an accountable elected representative of the people. In the USA, the President runs the federation, the fifty states are under the Governors, while the Mayor controls the city, all directly elected by the people. Except for the President, there is an Electoral College as well. The state of Texas is larger in area than Pakistan, yet it is fully functional. The cities are run by elected city governments. Town hall meetings are regularly held where public input is solicited to improve services; service to the people is the common agenda. Once the system is made functional by getting rid of the evils, devolution can be effective. The federal government has offices in major cities of America, but most day-to-day work is carried out by state and city governments. The Americans believe that no government is the best government; as such, employment is limited to minimal functional staff. Procedures are updated and simplified for the smooth flow of work. Obstacles are removed for functionality. More of the same has never worked in the past, nor will it work in the future. Dysfunctional bureaucracy has to be made functional to kick-start the stalled system for real devolution to take place.

By Aleena Saif Ullah The writer is an MPhil Scholar in International Relations, specializing in global defence and security, University of the Punjab, Lahore. On February 28, the first day of Operation Epic Fury, a strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in Iran’s Hormozgan province. Iranian state media reported that 168 children and 14 adults were killed. Anadolu reported two strikes roughly forty minutes apart. President Trump said on March 7 that in his opinion Iran had done it, citing Iranian inaccuracy with munitions. Bellingcat had already established otherwise. Its researchers identified a Tomahawk cruise missile — a munition no other belligerent in the conflict fields — in footage released by Iran’s Mehr agency, and geolocated the strike sequence. The New York Times, the Associated Press and CNN reached compatible conclusions through independent satellite and video analysis. By March 11, NPR reported that a preliminary Pentagon assessment had determined the United States was at fault. Five months later, the accountability failure is not the one I described when I first wrote about this case, and the actual failure is more instructive. A process was initiated. On March 13, Secretary Hegseth announced a formal command investigation, with CENTCOM appointing a senior officer from outside the command to lead it — the correct procedural choice. Lawmakers have said that officer submitted an initial report in April. CENTCOM has held it since. On May 19, Admiral Brad Cooper told lawmakers under oath that the investigation was complex, near completion, and that “I’m fully committed to transparency” once it concluded. No findings have been published. Then in July, CNN reported the detail that reframes the case. Within a week of the strike, the first two stages of the battle damage assessment were complete, establishing that American forces had hit the location. The third stage — the standard review in which Defense Intelligence Agency analysts examine the full body of satellite imagery and intelligence to determine holistically what occurred — had not been ordered as of early July. One source familiar with the matter told CNN there had been no detailed analysis and that CENTCOM had locked down the investigation. NBC reported that preliminary findings pointed to outdated intelligence as the likely cause. This is a different kind of institutional failure from the one international lawyers usually describe, and it is worse. An absent process can be demanded. A process that ran, produced a document, and stopped is much harder to move, because officials can accurately say an investigation took place. The context makes it harder still. On May 13 the Pentagon’s own Inspector General found that the Department had systematically failed to implement its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, with all eleven objectives reclassified as at risk and the legally mandated Civilian Protection Center of Excellence lacking key staff and leadership. The architecture built specifically to prevent and account for incidents like Minab had been allowed to decay before the war that tested it. Congress has asked the right questions and been ignored. A letter led by Senator Chris Van Hollen and signed by more than forty senators asked Secretary Hegseth directly whether American forces conducted the strikes, what the intended target was, whether AI tools were used in targeting, and whether a no-strike list was established before operations began. Answers were requested by March 18. More than 150 House members signed a parallel letter on the broader civilian toll. The comparison the Pentagon itself invites is unflattering. As NBC noted, the Department has publicly disclosed its role in comparable incidents before: a special forces raid in Yemen, a bombing in Iraq that killed more than a hundred civilians, the strike on an Afghan hospital that killed at least forty-two, a drone attack in Afghanistan that killed ten. Disclosure in those cases was not generous, but it happened. What Minab demonstrates is that the binding constraint on accountability is not evidence. Volunteer open-source investigators, working entirely from public material, established the essential facts within nine days. The state that conducted the strike established them internally within seven. The constraint is that no mechanism exists to compel publication of a report a government has decided not to publish — not the Rome Statute, to which the United States is not a party; not the Security Council, where it holds a veto; and not the Inspector General, who can find institutional failure but cannot release another command’s findings. One lever remains, and it is domestic rather than international. Congress can require declassified release of the findings through the National Defense Authorization Act. Whether it does will indicate more about the state of accountability for civilian harm than any further open-source analysis. The evidence is not missing. The report is not missing. Both exist. Neither can be read.    

The preceding part of this series ended with a limit that productive finance cannot cross. Illness, unemployment, education, disability, orphanhood and temporary distress cannot always be converted into profitable investments. Human vulnerability itself cannot become another financial product. That is where a riba-free order must move beyond banking. A society may successfully redesign murabaha, musharakah, salam or ijarah and still remain unjust if a family facing cancer treatment must borrow at any cost, a student must enter adult life under debt, or a widow depends upon a local patron for survival. Prohibition of riba becomes socially meaningful only when basic human need is protected from financial extraction. Pakistan does not have to invent the institutional vocabulary from zero. It already has Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal, established under the Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal Act, 1991. Its official mandate includes assistance to the destitute, widows, orphans, persons with disabilities and other needy citizens, with support extending to medical treatment, education and rehabilitation. Its official position is that assistance is available to the poorest without differentiation of religion, creed, sect or region. This is an important foundation. It is not yet the structure required for a just financial order. Bait-ul-Mal should cease to be understood primarily as an agency dispensing discretionary relief to the “poorest of the poor”. Its larger purpose should be to guarantee a legally defined social floor. Food in destitution, essential healthcare, basic education, protection of children without support, disability assistance and temporary subsistence during involuntary unemployment should become matters of entitlement under transparent criteria, not favours obtained through political access. This distinction is fundamental. Charity depends upon the generosity of the giver. Entitlement rests upon the responsibility of society. It is one of the most emphasised Quranic directive on this idea. The directions given in the holy Quran need not be accepted in totality. This principle is accepted in all the classical juristic traditions. The practical discussion on this is important. In the transitional phase, all the scholarly works envisage gradual movement rather than an overnight abolition of existing economic arrangements. Individuals progressively devote more of their resources to collective purposes while organised society assumes responsibility for the basic necessities of life.   The transition, in any pragmatic scheme, is institutional rather than merely charitable. That insight deserves attention. An Islamic polity cannot measure success by the number of ration bags distributed after deprivation has occurred. Its test is whether institutions progressively remove the conditions that force citizens into dependence upon creditors, property owners, political patrons or charitable intermediaries. Bait-ul-Mal should therefore form the first pillar of social finance: the guarantee against destitution. The second should be waqf. Waqf historically converted wealth into enduring social capital. Whatever the juristic differences concerning its precise legal character, its institutional genius lies in removing an asset from ordinary private consumption and dedicating its benefit to a continuing purpose. Land, buildings and income-producing properties can support hospitals, schools, hostels, water systems, vocational institutions, research centres, shelters and community infrastructure across generations. Pakistan already possesses statutory waqf institutions. Punjab’s Auqaf Department, for example, operates under the Punjab Waqf Properties Ordinance, 1979, for the administration and regulation of waqf properties. Income arising from properties under its control is credited to the Auqaf Fund under the statutory framework. The potential is much larger than administration of shrines and mosques. Pakistan should develop professionally governed public waqf institutions—waqf lillah—at national, provincial and local levels. Public land lawfully dedicated for community benefit, voluntarily endowed private property and other permissible assets could constitute permanent pools of social capital. Their corpus should remain protected while their income finances clearly defined public purposes. This cannot become another avenue for bureaucratic or political capture. Every waqf property should be digitally registered. Its title, purpose, valuation, income, expenditure and beneficiaries should be publicly accessible. Independent audit, professional management and strict conflict-of-interest rules are indispensable. No minister, shrine manager, political family or local notable should be able to convert property dedicated for public benefit into an instrument of patronage. The third pillar is zakat. It should remain distinct from both the ordinary budget and waqf. Its compulsory redistributive character and specified purposes give it an institutional identity of its own. Combining every form of social finance into one government account would destroy these distinctions. The fourth pillar is qard hasan. Not every person requiring temporary liquidity is destitute. A worker may face a medical emergency. A small farmer may need funds after a flood. A graduate may require equipment to begin earning. A household may need a short bridge between unemployment and a new job. Such circumstances do not necessarily call for a grant. They require finance without extraction. Revolving qard hasan funds administered through Bait-ul-Mal, public waqf institutions and local cooperatives could provide precisely that bridge. Principal would return when the recipient regains capacity, allowing the same pool to assist another household. The institution earns no commercial return from distress; society recycles solidarity. This connects directly with the cooperative model discussed in Part IV. The ultimate objective cannot be to create permanent classes of beneficiaries. Social protection should lead towards economic agency. A citizen receiving emergency assistance today should, wherever possible, become tomorrow’s producer, saver and member of a cooperative financial institution. Bait-ul-Mal prevents collapse. Waqf creates enduring social assets. Qard hasan provides a bridge back to economic activity. Cooperatives enable citizens to pool savings, own institutions and finance one another. These mechanisms should operate together rather than as isolated schemes. The structure can be visualised as a ladder. At its base is an enforceable social floor below which no citizen is allowed to fall. Above it are education, healthcare and skills supported partly through public waqf. Temporary setbacks are met through qard hasan. Productive citizens then move towards cooperative and commercial risk-sharing finance of the kind discussed in Part IV. The direction is from dependency to capability, not from one form of dependency to another. Governance will determine whether this succeeds. Pakistan has repeatedly created institutions in the name of disadvantaged citizens and then allowed

The first part of this series concluded with a question that goes deeper than the contractual forms employed by conventional or Islamic banks: who should possess the power to create money—society through its sovereign monetary authority, or commercial banks through the expansion of credit? It is impossible to reconstruct a financial order without answering this question. Popular understanding of banking remains surprisingly detached from the way modern money actually comes into existence. The conventional explanation suggests that people first deposit their savings with banks and banks subsequently lend part of those deposits to borrowers. Banks thus appear principally as intermediaries between savers and investors. Modern banking does not operate quite like this. The Bank of England, explaining the process in unusually clear terms, acknowledges that most money in a modern economy is created by commercial banks when they make loans. A bank granting financing normally credits the borrower’s account and simultaneously records a corresponding asset on its own balance sheet.  The deposit is created through the act of lending rather than necessarily representing money previously deposited by another saver. When the loan principal is repaid, the corresponding bank-created money is extinguished. This requires an important correction to the familiar expression “fractional-reserve banking”.  Banks are certainly required to maintain reserves, liquidity and regulatory capital, but contemporary money creation cannot accurately be understood as a mechanical process in which every rupee of reserves is successively multiplied into a predetermined number of rupees of loans.  Lending is constrained by capital requirements, liquidity, creditworthiness, profitability, regulation, settlement requirements and ultimately monetary policy. It nevertheless remains true that deposit-taking commercial banks create a substantial part of the money used by society. Pakistan is no exception. State Bank of Pakistan’s monetary data show that at end-June 2026 broad money was about Rs. 46.46 trillion. Currency in circulation was about Rs. 11.94 trillion, while deposits with banks were approximately Rs. 34.47 trillion. The greater part of what Pakistanis use as money does not consist of notes issued by the State Bank. It consists of claims recorded in the banking system. This distinction has profound consequences for our discussion of riba. Commercial-bank creation of deposit money should not automatically be declared riba. The Quran does not prescribe a reserve ratio, a central-bank structure or a particular technique for creating currency.  To equate fractional-reserve banking itself with riba would unnecessarily turn a question of monetary system into a theological declaration. The real objection is different. A society must ask whether the privilege of creating generally accepted purchasing power should be exercised primarily through private debt contracts; who receives the initial benefit of newly created purchasing power; towards which activities the new credit is directed; who absorbs the losses when excessive credit creation produces instability; and whether private institutions can earn a predetermined return from money whose creation depends ultimately upon the sovereign monetary and payment system. These are questions of political economy and distributive justice. Pakistan provides an especially revealing example. SBP’s provisional monetary aggregates at end-June 2026 recorded net government-sector borrowing of more than Rs. 37 trillion.  Net borrowing from scheduled banks was overwhelmingly larger than direct borrowing from SBP, while credit to the private sector stood at around Rs. 11.4 trillion. The precise categories require care in interpretation, but the broad structural message is difficult to miss: the banking system has become deeply intertwined with financing the State itself. Banks operate within an extraordinary circle. The State confers the banking licence, provides the settlement infrastructure, regulates deposits, maintains monetary stability and acts ultimately as guardian of systemic stability. Banks create deposit money through their financing operations and then deploy enormous resources in government securities carrying returns ultimately serviced through public revenues. The citizen appears at both ends of the transaction by providing deposits to the banking system and later pays taxes from which sovereign financial obligations are serviced. The arrangement may be perfectly lawful under the existing system, but a project seeking elimination of riba cannot ignore its structural implications. Conversion of conventional banks into Islamic banks does not, by itself, answer this problem. An Islamic deposit-taking institution can participate in the same process of deposit creation when it extends financing. If its balance sheet remains concentrated in sovereign instruments and if its returns remain indirectly anchored to the prevailing interest-rate structure, conversion of contractual terminology leaves the underlying monetary structure substantially intact. This is one reason why the proposal recently advanced by Muhammad Munir Ahmad for an alternative riba-free system deserves serious consideration. It correctly asks whether money creation and commercial financing should be separated. Its criticism of the privileges inherent in the existing banking structure identifies a problem much larger than the replacement of an interest-bearing loan with murabaha or ijarah. The proposed solution, however, requires considerable refinement. One possibility is a system under which transaction money is fully backed by sovereign money.  Current accounts used for salaries, business payments and ordinary transactions would represent money held for payment and safekeeping. Banks would not be permitted to use these balances to create additional financing. Investment would take place through an entirely different window. A person seeking a return would knowingly place funds in an investment account. Those funds could be employed in mudarabah, musharakah, leasing, trade finance and other genuine commercial arrangements. Return would arise from investment, ownership, enterprise or service rather than merely from allowing a bank to create a debt against a transaction deposit. This idea is neither historically unprecedented nor uniquely associated with Islamic economics. During the Great Depression, economists associated with what became known as the Chicago Plan proposed 100 per cent reserve backing for transaction deposits, expressly separating the monetary function of banks from their credit function. Irving Fisher became one of its prominent advocates.  Decades later, an International Monetary Fund (IMF) working paper by Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof revisited the proposal and modelled potential effects including greater control over credit cycles and reductions in private and public debt. The paper was research rather than IMF policy, but