Beasts of burden

THIS is perfect. The power bureaucracy has decided to go on the offensive against users of net-metering services, and decided to describe them all as a ‘burden’ and tell the rest of the power users in the country that their bills are high because a few are escaping the grid by going solar. And thanks to this misfire, this entirely unnecessary hostility, we now have the perfect illustration of why our country has been sinking into the quicksand of stagnation for so many decades. The central problem is this: as the world changed around them, our bureaucrats were busy trying to save their bureaucracy rather than finding ways to adapt, to keep pace with the change, and better still, to harness the new energies being unleashed all around them. This has been the story of Pakistan’s journey throughout the economic and technological transformations of the past half century.