Media Coverage

Federal Minister for Water and Power, Syed Naveed Qamar here on Tuesday said that the government has taken number of steps for the generation of low cost energy by exploiting alternate energy resources like coal and windmills for sustainable economic development in the country.Addressing the 14th conference of Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), he said that a comprehensive progamme has been chalked out with the cooperation of China in transport and fertilizer sctors to fulfill the domestic requirements.The title of the conference was “Redefining Paradigm of Sustainable Development in South Asia”.
He said that South Asian region has a common history and shared future, instead of embroiled with the different kinds of conflicts tormenting the lives of billions of people.
“We should cooperate and promote feelings of one region as it will benefit all the regional countries with regard to poverty alleviation, social development, social justice and natural resource management”, he added.
He said that the region has always followed the policy of ‘looking at the West’ for development but it missed where it wanted to go and now the time has come to adopt a policy of ‘looking at the East’ keeping in view the regional economic cooperation and neighbourhood.
Talking about Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to India and Pak-China joint initiatives he said cooperation and partnership between the countries in the region is of utmost importance which would enable us to resolve our issues and challenges.
He appreciated SDPI for its independent expert contributions for national policy-making in past and hoped that it will continue its people-centered work in future.
Keynote Speaker, Dr Sabina Alkire of the Oxford University’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative said the measurement of poverty needs to take into account multi-faceted nature of deprivations faced by the poor.
She shared the salient findings of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2011 with particular reference to South Asia, which was earlier launched by the UNDP Human Development Report Office.
Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri, Executive Director, SDPI launched the SDC 2010 Anthology, ‘Peace and Sustainable Development in South Asia: The Way Forward’. Citing global current crisis involving economic, social, political, environmental dimensions, he said that prevalent development paradigms in developed world have not been able to take care of the current generations what to talk of future generations.
This conference would also try to come up with new normative for our existing problems and we hope that revised normative may lead to revised solutions” he added.