In the good old days, Coca-Cola was not merely a drink; it was practically a potion. Marketed as a medicinal beverage, it even claimed to relieve headaches — the sort of miracle cure you could wash down with ice. Over time, of course, the sales pitch matured. Today, Coca-Cola’s advertisements rarely mention health; instead, they bathe the product in warm, fuzzy emotions — joy, celebration, friendship — all the while politely ignoring the growing research linking sugary drinks to obesity, diabetes, and other health problems.
Now, in a twist worthy of satire, this “advertainment” model seems to have been cloned and planted right in the heart of Pakistan’s Planning Commission. Here, too, marketing has taken precedence over substance — only the product is not a fizzy beverage, but glossy “visions” for the nation’s future. And at the centre of it all is one tireless content writer, forever recycling the formats of other countries’ plans, safe in the knowledge that no one will bother to sue Pakistan for plagiarism.
The credits roll like a film trilogy. First came Vision 2010 in 1998, authored when the same man was Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. Then came Vision 2025 in 2014 — a shiny roadmap promising to lift Pakistan into the ranks of the world’s top 25 economies by 2025. And most recently, on 31 December 2024, we were treated to Uraan Pakistan, officially titled the National Economic Transformation Plan 2024–29. This latest five-year strategy again pledges “sustainable growth” and “modernisation” through targeted reforms and investments.
Real advertising is hard — distilling an idea into a single striking sentence that grips a global audience. But here, the Commission’s wordsmith appears not only to have missed that art form but possibly skipped reading his own work altogether.
And here is where the humour fades, and the tragedy sets in. The Planning Commission of Pakistan, born in 1952, was once led by the nation’s sharpest minds. Its founding Chairman, Zahid Husain, had been Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, the founding Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, and the architect of Pakistan’s very first five-year plan. He was followed by giants like Mirza Muzaffar Ahmad, Vice President of the World Bank, and Dr Mahbub ul-Haq, the visionary economist who created the Human Development Index — a tool now used worldwide to measure national progress. Under their stewardship, Pakistan’s five-year plans quietly but decisively delivered economic growth rates exceeding 8%.
Instead of prosperity, these projects became shackles — debt traps so tight that, in the Prime Minister’s own words, they reduced Pakistan to a begging bowl before the global community
Once, there was a proud legacy — a vision born of grit and purpose — now reduced to something as hollow and gaudy as a Coca-Cola ad campaign: all gloss, no soul. Vision 2025 had promised that by this year, Pakistan would stand proudly among the world’s top 25 economies. By the halfway mark in 2018, under the same ruling regime, one might have hoped to see at least half of those ambitions fulfilled. Instead, the reality was a cruel unveiling: not a roadmap to progress, but a glossy brochure filled with empty words.
From 2022 to the present, the Deputy Chairman has again sat at the helm of the Planning Commission — three long years squandered — and what is the result? Pakistan has not climbed; it has stumbled further down to 44th place in the global economic rankings. The Commission’s once-noble mission has withered into a hollow bureaucratic exercise, reduced to the mechanical allocation of funds — a task a basic computer could perform with greater efficiency and fewer pretensions.
In the annals of our nation’s despair, few moments shine as darkly as the years when the Planning Commission’s banners of deception fluttered proudly from 2014 to 2019. These advertisements — loud, boastful, and deceitful — were hailed as the dawn of progress, declaring to the world that Pakistan had entered a new age of coal and LNG power. In 2015, when the mega coal power plants and liquefied natural gas (LNG) power plants were unveiled, the Deputy Chairman himself dared to call them a “game-changer.”
But the game they changed was our survival. The dream they sold was a mirage. Instead of prosperity, these projects became shackles — debt traps so tight that, in the Prime Minister’s own words, they reduced Pakistan to a begging bowl before the global community. Never in living memory have advertisements — mere words printed and spoken — inflicted such devastation upon a people.
And yet the tragedy is layered deeper still. Even as warnings sounded, the Planning Commission chose technology already obsolete, as if deliberately writing the script for national ruin. This was not merely a technical error; it was an unprecedented miscalculation in modern history, a blunder so vast that the 250 million souls of Pakistan now shed tears each month when their electricity bills arrive — a constant reminder of betrayal wrapped in paper.
In the old chronicles of engineering failure, we read of Engineer Colonel Barog of the British Raj, who, after a single miscalculation in the Barog tunnel of the Kalka–Shimla Railway in 1903, took his own life in shame. Yet here, after a blunder that dwarfs his in scale and consequence, there is no remorse, no apology — only silence from those who lit the fuse and walked away, leaving a nation in the ashes of their ambition.
Has the Commission ever conducted a meaningful post-evaluation of PSDP projects? The answer, bitterly, is no. Has its legion of well-paid members ever conceived a single transformative project to lift the nation’s economy? Again, the answer is no. The only achievement they can lay claim to is their own induction into an exclusive, self-satisfied elite — a club where progress is measured not in national development, but in personal privilege.
The contradiction is glaring. The Commission’s mission statement nobly declares: “A SUSTAINABLE INITIATIVE TO ENSURE THAT ALL THE PHYSICALLY CHALLENGED PEOPLE OF PAKISTAN ARE USEFULLY INTEGRATED INTO THE SOCIETY.” Yet the same “visionary” professor has sat as Deputy Chairman for the past three years, including under an interim government, as the country has slid deeper into hardship.
The SIFC should develop and publish a range of indices and reports, such as an SDG Pakistan Index and an Aspirational Districts Programme (ADP), to track progress and pinpoint areas in urgent need of attention
According to the World Bank, more than 45% of Pakistan’s population now lives below the poverty line. Once guided by intellectuals who shaped global economic thinking, the Planning Commission has been reduced to a plagiarised pitch — a nation’s future sold like a soft drink. We must be clear — this is not mocking the professor. Far from it. When the great professor speaks, it is with the cadence of Mortem Lother King himself, and we find ourselves spellbound by his appearances on television. For a brief, intoxicating moment, we truly believe that, by the end of his speech, one Pakistani rupee will be worth a hundred US dollars. Then, as the applause fades, reality returns — and it feels as though we have just watched a thrilling James Bond adventure, dazzling but entirely disconnected from real life. In this particular art form, the professor deserves nothing less than 110 marks out of 100.
The question arises: why is the Deputy Chairman being placed in such an unfortunate position, effectively ending the remaining years of his career as an engineer in this way? It is not entirely his fault, and in fairness, we must absolve him of full responsibility. The real blame lies with the 11 members who enjoy top salaries and privileges — yet have utterly failed to deliver on the Commission’s stated mission.
How could they succeed when one of these members was the very individual who sabotaged the Energy Excellence Centre at Engineering Peshawar, a project established with USAID support? That debacle was so damaging that it contributed to President Trump’s decision to halt USAID operations globally. Even more baffling is the inclusion of a member whose background is in running an NGO that helps people regain lost limb functionality. Despite this supposedly diverse expertise, the Planning Commission has failed to gain any meaningful momentum towards its objectives.
Yet perhaps the greatest irony lies with the Prime Ministers who are proud graduates of the prestigious Government College, Lahore. They seem to have learned nothing from the “illiterate tea-seller” Narendra Modi, who decisively shelved India’s Planning Commission in 2014.
Still, there may be light at the end of the tunnel. The Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), established on 20 June 2023, was designed to serve as a “single window” for investors and to bring the Planning Commission’s vision to life. But to truly escape the long, inauspicious shadow of the PC, the Commission must be shelved immediately. The SIFC should be transformed into the apex public policy think tank of the Government of Pakistan, serving as the nodal agency to drive economic development, foster cooperative federalism, and move beyond “bargaining federalism” by involving provincial governments in economic policymaking through a genuine bottom-up approach.
We strongly recommend that the SIFC take on a critical responsibility that the Planning Commission has consistently failed to execute effectively — conducting systematic performance evaluations through a dedicated Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO). This office should be tasked with assessing the effectiveness of federal and provincial governments’ programmes and policies, focusing on improving service delivery, outcomes, and overall impact through robust data analysis, thorough evaluations, and actionable policy inputs.
In addition, the SIFC should develop and publish a range of indices and reports, such as an SDG Pakistan Index and an Aspirational Districts Programme (ADP), to track progress and pinpoint areas in urgent need of attention. The DMEO must serve as the central authority for monitoring and evaluation, with a mandate to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and sustainability of public service delivery.
By adopting modern technology and advanced data analytics, the DMEO would not only improve the accuracy and timeliness of information but also provide real-time insights for decision-making. Rigorous outcome evaluations would ensure that programmes are measured by tangible results rather than inputs, enabling the SIFC to pursue evidence-based policymaking and deliver meaningful improvements in governance.