LAHORE: Minister of State for Revenue Mian Hammad Azhar has said that IMF loan is the biggest hurdle in way of progress of our country.
He expressed these views while addressing a seminar which was conducted jointly by Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) and Iqbal Academy Pakistan (IAP).
He said, “The biggest hindrance in the way of the progress of Pakistan is external debt and we have to pay Rs 1800 billion annually for that. The loan had been taken from 1971 to 2018 and the most of it was taken in the term of 2008-2018 in which the so-called democratic governments left the future generation of Pakistan in debt”.
Senator Waleed Iqbal while expressing his views said that the first book of Dr Allama M. Iqbal was Ilm-ul-Iqtasad and he wrote it at a time when there was no other book on this subject in Urdu. When Quaid-e-Azam sought Iqbal’s support in Pakistan, his reply was that All India Muslim League could get support from Punjab only if it paid attention to public issues, welfare and financial prosperity. The representative of IAP Dr Tahir Hameed Tanoli said that today’s seminar is a historical moment on which economists and the followers of Iqbal are sitting together to discuss economy.
Umer Zaheer said that Ilm-ul-Iqtasad of Dr Iqbal holds the same place in our educational history that the books of Adam Smith and Carl Marx hold in the West. He said that today we are in the need of the guidance over the same things that Iqbal had guided us in his very first book.
Renowned economist Shahzad Ahmed Bhatti said that various development models have been introduced in the world among which the model proposed by China is considered to be most effective but if the model that Iqbal proposed is considered, that would be the best model for development.
Famous economist and Scholar Ikram-ul-Haq said that we could not get rid of International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) loan that is why our economy policies are still obeying the rules of IMF which is why we do not consider the Islamic model for development. Gifts were distributed by IAP in the audience at the end of the seminar whereas Khwaja Khalid Aftab hosted the event.
