Pakistan’s Engineering sector has urged its government to have a bifocal approach on its export strategies instead of solely relying on textiles. A workshop on National Engineering Exports Development Strategy (NEEDS) has evaluated that the government’s policy favouring textile industry for the past 60 years has made its export growth vulnerable to the vagaries of nature.
The Engineering Development Board (EDB) which organized the workshop was attended by various industry heads and government officials. Zaheeruddin Dar, Chairman of DART, a consulting firm which is associated with the formation of NEEDS presented 29 point proposal draft at the workshop including the establishment of EXIM bank, trade promotions and industry specific training institutions.
While addressing the workshop, Governor Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Owais Ahmed Ghani said that despite insurgency, great opportunities in the engineering and technological industrial sectors awaited Pakistan. It should be noted, the recently concluded Pak-US Trade and Investment Council had remarked that due to efforts of Pakistan to combat terrorism, it has suffered huge losses and its export competitiveness declined considerably.
Razzaq Dawood, one of the business leaders told that if Pakistan desired to achieve the $70bn export target it had to integrate engineering, chemical and information technology (IT) development at par with textiles. In response, Minister for Industries and Production, Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani assured that his government would bring about necessary changes to facilitate the engineering industry to play its due role. Furthermore, engineering sector’s significant growth last year when exports of Pakistan decreased by 11 percent also compels the Gilani administration to give equal priority for other key sectors apart from textiles.
The NEEDS has chalked out plans to energize the industry from its $800mn exports to $10bn in next 15yrs through the implementation of the proposal draft. It has identified Central Africa and Latin America as potential markets and Pakistan has the ability to tap more than $165bn market through right approach. It has also observed the country’s engineering products had good demand in international markets owing to their price competitiveness, and all they needed was extra support from the government to exploit the export opportunities overseas.
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