Written by Ch. Faisal Mehmood
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 our politicians have shown their intellectual bankruptcy to understand neither the need nor the urgency.
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.
The MD PTDC participated in Official ceremony of world tourism day in Qatar last month but we have no news or information that out all federal and provincial tourism organizations, which one going to participate in WTM London and which area of Pakistan will be promoted touristically, as all provincial tourism organizations promote their own regions and tourism products, and not whole of Pakistan. In many cases outside world even now 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. Last year a provincial government, endowed with financial sufficiency, recently 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 do recall 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 strength at world events. ¡
