Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry has called upon the government to urgently focus on infrastructure development as the poor infrastructure is constraining economic activity and reducing the country’s growth potential.

Zahid Maqbool, President ICCI chairing a meeting of businessmen said that physical infrastructure in Pakistan (consisting power, telecommunications, roads, ports, railways, air transport, urban infrastructure, IT cyber parks and industrial estates etc.) is quite inadequate in comparison with world standards and this situation is holding back the country from better rapid economic growth.

He said according to the World Economic Forum Survey (2006-07) of 125 countries, Pakistan ranked 67th in basic infrastructure which requires that government should allocate more resources for infrastructure development to remove the chronic imbalance between demand and supply of infrastructure facilities.

He said electricity and power infrastructure of the country has already come under major strain. He said lack of adequate energy resources is precluding industrial growth affecting all sectors of the economy, He said if these problems are not addressed urgently, the infrastructure sector in its totality will become a major bottleneck for continued growth and development of the country.

Businessmen said a World Bank study shows that Pakistan’s ageing and inadequate irrigation and water infrastructure deficit alone is estimated at Rs.4 trillion while the country needs to invest almost Rs.60 billion per year in new large dams and related infrastructure over the next five years. Similarly, the under performance of the transport infrastructure costing the economy about Rs.300 billion  per year while current power shortages of 1500-2000 MW will increase to 6,000 megawatts by the year 2010 and 30,700 megawatts by the year 2020.

This state of affairs demonstrates that the government requires heavy investment in physical infrastructure in order to improve delivery of social services and to enhance its domestic and global competitiveness.

He said the one better option for the government to attract maximum investment in infrastructure development is to involve private sector in these ventures. Therefore, government should work out a long-term strategy to enhance infrastructure investment and create an enabling environment for increased private sector involvement in infrastructure development so that Pakistan could overcome this problem which will pave way for sustainable economic development of the country.