First things first: the spirit behind the government’s Naya Pakistan Housing Programme (NPHP) must be commended.The struggle for dignified housing in Pakistan has a long history replete with brutal......
Khadija (not her real name) is a 60-year-old woman.She started having dull central chest discomfort while she was cooking the afternoon meal for her family. She decided to ignore it.It is when she......
Pakistan’s formula for economic growth is as flawed as it gets: borrow foreign currency-denominated loans, build some large-scale infrastructure, get a minor growth spurt in the process, and wait......
Pakistan’s affordable housing crisis is a definitive instance of both market and government failure.Slums, katchi abadis, unplanned or informal, illegal settlements proliferate because the market and......
Prime Minister Imran Khan has called on the Pakistani diaspora to help fund construction of the Diamer-Bhasha Dam.Credit is due to the new government for vowing to act with alacrity, and in a novel......
Pakistan’s power sector is in an eternal state of crisis.From chronic load shedding to electricity theft, heavy transmission and distribution losses to massive non-payment of built-up dues, the......
Standing next to the depleted Ravi river, the renovated Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib with its white dome is a lonely structure.On any given day, there are only a handful of devotees at the shrine, most......
A few months ago, I visited a newly-opened museum in Lahore that, along with sections on Partition and the contemporary history of Pakistan, also included an exhibit on its ancient and pre-colonial......
The recent general elections in Pakistan saw 47 percent of the women registered to vote turn out to express their political preferences at the polls; while this is an increase from previous......
This is the concluding half of a two-part series about the South Asian diaspora that eventually came to be Singaporean-Pakistanis. Read part one here.For more than five decades before the widespread......
The following piece is an excerpt from Anam Zakaria’s recent book Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-Administered Kashmir published by HarperCollins India.In her book, Zakaria details......
The Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) has astonished many with its vote tally in the 2018 general elections. The votes didn’t earn TLP many seats though.Apart from two Sindh Assembly seats, it could......
This is part one of a two-part series about the South Asian diaspora that eventually came to be Singaporean-Pakistanis. Stay tuned for part two.Not many people may know or remember that the former......
There once used to be a gateway here, one of the 13 gates that allowed entry into the walled city.In the aftermath of 1857 and the debacle for the British in Delhi, the walls of Lahore were......
It is early evening and Sally’s* beauty parlour in Rawalpindi is teeming with women undergoing their weekly or monthly beauty regimen.Switching between Hakka and Urdu, with occasional interjections......
