ISLAMABAD: President Dr Arif Alvi on Thursday underlined the need for nurturing the ‘intellect ability’ and ‘innovative ideas’ of the educated youth to achieve the required goals of national progress and prosperity.
“Pakistan does not lack solutions [to confronted issues] but the doers,” he said while addressing the award distribution ceremony of the grand finale-III of the country’s biggest ideas competition held under the National Idea Bank (NIB) vision, organized by the National University of Technology (NUTEC) and ASPIRES Pakistan.
He said the ideas, shared by the youth in the competition, needed such an environment where these could be transformed into qualitative and competitive products, enabling the country to increase its exports and reduce imports.
President Alvi said he had been proponent of exploring innovative ideas for last 15 years. He said this was the best forum through which the youth could be engaged to seek innovative ideas.
“This is era of human resource and innovation so the intellectual ability is the most important in this regard,” he added. Sharing a success story of the country’s data management on scientific lines coupled with ideal civil-military cooperation during COVID-19, he said Pakistan was declared the third best performing country in the world, while its neighboring countries were far behind in this index.
He said Pakistan had utilize the experience and data collected during country wide anti-polio drives to properly manage the disease spread.
He said, the country should have to make similar and effective policies to improve world ranking in other areas as well. He said some 26.2 million children were currently out of school across the country.
The president pointed out that this area too need proper attention as without developing human resource, the country could not compete with the world.
He also raised questions about the validity of the recent polls, asserting that the introduction of electronic voting machines (EVMs) could have averted the chaos surrounding the election results.
Emphasizing the potential benefits of EVMs, he stated that their use could have ensured a free, fair, and transparent electoral process by digitally counting votes.
He expressed a lack of hope and trust in the current accountability system, citing allegations of rigging in the February 8 polls. Emphasizing the need to promote unity in the country, the president said without unity the country could not achieve goals of stability, prosperity and development.
