Pakistan does not suffer from a shortage of development spending. It suffers from a shortage of development discipline. For decades, successive governments have poured billions of rupees into the Public Sector Development Programme, into provincial development schemes, and into flagship infrastructure initiatives. Yet an uncomfortable question hangs over all of it: what have we actually built that will still be serving this country in twenty-five, thirty or fifty years? Too often the honest answer is disappointing. Roads crumble within a few winters of their inauguration. Public buildings need repair almost as soon as they are handed over. Drainage systems collapse under the first serious monsoon. Bridges require premature rehabilitation. Development schemes are designed around the logic of annual budget cycles rather than the logic of a nation's long-term needs. This is not simply an engineering failure. It is a failure of governance, and it begins with a habit of mind that has come to define the Pakistani state: what might be called the contractorisation of government itself.

In theory, government is meant to be the policymaker, the regulator, the custodian of public money and the guardian of the public interest. In practice, in Pakistan, the state has folded almost every one of those roles into one indistinguishable mass. It plans the project, designs it, procures it, supervises it, certifies it and, in effect, behaves as though it were the contractor building it. The very institutions meant to hold the process to account are the ones deciding what gets built, how it is tendered, who wins the contract, how variations are approved, and when payment is finally released. The referee, in other words, has quietly become a player in the game.

This is not for want of rules. Pakistan has laws on competitive bidding, on transparency, on evaluation, on electronic procurement, on public disclosure. What it lacks is an institutional culture that respects them rather than routes around them. And it is in that gap between the law on paper and the practice on the ground that corruption stops being an occasional lapse and becomes something closer to a system. It can begin at the drafting stage, with specifications quietly tilted toward a favoured bidder. It can continue through inflated estimates, fragmented projects designed to dodge scrutiny thresholds, and political priorities dressed up as technical ones. Contractors learn that survival depends less on competence than on relationships. Once work begins, variations creep in and quietly inflate the value of the contract. Supervision, meant to be independent, becomes compromised by the same networks that awarded the work in the first place. By the time a project is declared complete, the public has almost no way of knowing whether it received value for its money.

The consequences of this culture are not abstract. They are visible on the ground, most vividly on the country's most storied piece of infrastructure. The Lahore–Islamabad Motorway, built with Korean participation, was once held up as proof of what........

© The Friday Times