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"One would agree fully with the speakers at the Dr Akhter Hameed Khan development forum held in Karachi on Sunday. What clearly emerged from their presentations was that many of the projects being undertaken by the government with the help of foreign aid-giving agencies are not really in the interest of the people for whose benefit they are meant to be.
One speaker even identified a few projects which he had studied in depth to prove this point. He emphatically stated that the procedure of planning and executing these projects militated against the welfare of the community. Moreover, they created conditions that worked to the advantage of foreign governments and business concerns, while increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
There are a number of aspects of this issue which call for attention. First is the role of the aid-giving agencies. It would be simplistic to assume that they come forward with an offer of a loan for purely altruistic reasons. There are no free lunches now, and the donor almost invariably has a hidden agenda which the loan taker should try to discover.
Apart from the political motive of gaining control over a Third World country's foreign and economic policies, the aid giver also seeks to promote the financial interests of its patrons. That would explain why most loans are so closely tied to specifics which are determined by the donors without taking into account the interests of the people to be affected. One speaker cited the case of the fish harbour in Karachi which was developed to promote deep-sea fishing for the trawlers of some foreign countries to the detriment of the local fishermen.
The second, more crucial, aspect is how our own governments are lured into taking loans which have pushed the country into a debt trap. The argument that the country needs more loans to repay the old ones does not hold true.
Most project loans are tied to specific ventures which cumulatively add to the overall debt burden. The keenness of policy-makers to accept loans is quite strange. True, many of them have been educated in western universities and quite a few have worked for international financial agencies whose thinking they have obviously imbibed. Others might be tempted by the massive sums involved which provide plenty of scope for corruption and illegal cuts for the compradors.
Then how should a Third World country with its limited resources finance its development needs? It is here that we should find it relevant to draw upon the philosophy of the man for whom the memorial meeting in Karachi was organized. Dr Akhter Hameed Khan was a staunch advocate of self-reliance and strongly believed that people should depend on their own resources to uplift themselves by means of their own planning and participation and according to their own development priorities.
He proved the feasibility of this approach in the Orangi Pilot Project where he mobilized the local population to transform their living conditions. It is time we adopted this approach as an integral part of planning, which would help reduce our need for foreign loans and the parasitism that it entails."