WRITTEN BY CH. FAISAL MAHMOOD
We have previously drawn attention to the pressing need for a federal posture for Pakistan Tourism’s internal co-ordination and external unity. The need for a federal Ministry of Tourism is acquiring greater urgency but previously our politicians have shown no interest which proved their intellectual bankruptcy to understand neither the need nor the urgency. But now the issue is being discussed in the lobbies of Senate and National assembly.
Tourism’s is not the only voice calling for even a limited restoration of the Concurrent List of yore. Stakeholders in other sectors like education, culture, health – any and every sector which requires internal co-ordination for external impact – have also called for federal dispensations for themselves.
In the present world of globalization, the word co-ordination does not mean only consultation, for which some tell us the federal Ministry of Inter-Provincial Co-ordination should suffice; co-ordination now denotes a visible, unified and enforceable national level of product standards and policy depth for the international community to deal with us.
Though some private parties participated last week in WTM London, the World’s Largent and most effective event of travel and tourism but there was no united voice for tourism Pakistan, it would have been much better if federal and all provincial tourism organizations have participated together to promote whole of Pakistan.
Still in many cases outside world even does not know whom to contact in Islamabad for extending its formal invitation to Pakistan; it is not for them to go looking into our provinces. Even last year also a provincial government, endowed with financial sufficiency, set up a costly stall at a major tourism marketing event in Europe and put itself on record of the voice and print media as inviting potential tourists to visit that province.
We are reminded here of a very senior stakeholder in our industry saying, sometime back, that the Senator who prides himself in having authored the eighteenth amendment should actually be hauled up for creating an abstract but potent mechanism for eliminating our combined & United strength at world events. ¡
