Frozen in time

There must be something uniquely odd with ordinary Pakistanis.  They voluntarily choose to park their savings in National Savings Centres instead of tax-free Panama and other offshore havens. My research spread over many years and hundreds of interviews suggests some startling hitherto undiscovered benefits of the National Savings. First, there are huge medical benefits surreptitiously built into the nature of National Saving Schemes. They keep the senior citizens physically active and mentally alert, anxiously awaiting the due date for collection of monthly profits. The Nationals Savings Schemes also operate hand-in-glove with our transport industry, generating millions of (completely avoidable) bus, car and rickshaw trips every month. The Savings Centres also act like clubs, providing a monthly opportunity for people to socialise.

The bureaucrats of Pakistan, who often keep their own money abroad, have intentionally kept this system unchanged for the past 70 years. There would be no Grade 20 and 21 officials in the National Savings, if the 3377 employees and 367 branches were not engaged in dealing with millions of begging and pleading customers. For the past three decades the National Savings Organisation has been hoodwinking the people of Pakistan by making false promises of its planned computerisation. All they needed was to ask each customer to specify a bank and an account number at which the profits could be automatically credited every month. Customers could receive an auto-generated SMS to confirm the transaction. Can a critical change happen in a country where the ruling elite stashes its ‘loot’ in foreign lands while the ordinary citizens undergo agonising processes to receive monthly profits on their  lifetime savings which are often their only subsistence?

Naeem Sadiq

Karachi