Pak Tea House

BOOK REVIEW: A non-futile life in bureaucracy by Khaled Ahmed

 Fard-e-Hayat;
By AK Khalid;
Allied Press Lahore 2006;

He went on to do his MA in History and Persian, and collected those tough degrees in Persian and Arabic known as Adeeb Fazil, Munshi Fazil and Maulvi Fazil. A cowherd from Gujrat had come to Lahore with nothing in his pocket and had walked away with the city’s best degrees

Abdul Karim Khalid is a tall dapper man in his eighties who became famous abroad…pointedly, not in Pakistan…for writing the best critical book on the wrong imposition of ushr in Pakistan: The Agrarian History of Pakistan. He did that as a result of the expertise accumulated by him as member Punjab Revenue Board for ten years at the end of a hardworking career in the Punjab Civil Service. The autobiography is a proof of what you can squeeze out of an otherwise dull life if you have the memory of a genius.
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Raza Rumi

Is it the case that finally the centuries old steelframe is getting irrelevant in the fast changing urban Pakistan. In a country of 170 million, there were not enough competent and interested candidates to fill up the vacancies for the competitive examination. If on one hand, this trend betrays the decline of institutions, on the other it spells doom for the future of Pakistan’s governance. There can be no compromise on a capable civil service to manage and implement policies. Singapore and many other countries attract the best and here we are, with massive unemployment, not finding enough people to fill the vacancies. Yes the private sector is more attractive and perhaps should be but what about state’s regulatory and redistributive functions?

CSS Exam fails to fill 100 vacancies - Daily News, 4/25/08
ISLAMABAD: The country’s Civil Services structure is facing an unprecedented downfall with educated youth losing interest in civil bureaucracy as the latest Central Superior Services (CSS) competition could not even produce the number of successful candidates against the available posts. Against the total 290 available posts, the number of successful candidates in the 2007 CSS competition was merely 190, leaving almost 100 vacancies unoccupied till fresh induction is made through the next CSS competition.

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