Rs2.482 trillion Federal Budget presented in NA

ISLAMABAD: Federal Budget 2009-10 envisaging a total outlay of Rs2.482 billion has been presented. State Minister for Finance and Economic Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar presented the Federal Budget 2009-10 in which 15 percent raise has been announced in the salaries and pension of in-service and retired government employees.The target of GDP for the next fiscal year has been fixed at 3.3 percent while measures will be adopted for bringing the inflation rate below 10 percent. The State Minister said the total allocation for Public Sector Development Program (PSDP) has been made at Rs646 billion; Rs 343 billion for Defence Rs31.60 billion for education sector and; Rs6.5 billion for health.The allocation for Benazir Income Support Program has been raised to Rs70 billion which will be distributed among 5 million deserving people. Rs50 billion have been earmarked for the relief and rehabilitation of affectees of Malakand Division. In order to impart training to the youth under National Internship Program Rs3.60 billion have been allocated. Under the program 30,000 youth will be provided professional training in their respective fields. The target for tax revenue collection has been raised by 15.7 percent to 1.3775 trillion while the rest of the expenditure will be met through foreign loans and grants.Rs178 billion are expected to be received through Friends of Pakistan Consortium. The fiscal deficit is expected at 4.9 percent for the next fiscal year. Increase in the allowance has been announced for the armed forces deployed on the western front. This allowance will be equal to one month’s initial basic pay with effect from 1st July 2009, as announced by the President of Pakistan. Feel free to share your opinion with us on the State Minister’s speech on Budget 2009-10.

Pakistan’s economic woes intensify

Apart from the impacts of global economic downturn, Pakistan’s intensifying economic woes historically depict to be cyclic—taking one step forward for a while and no sooner it reaches to a breakthrough point some mishap occurs leading to political turmoil, throwing the economy back to two steps backward. But this time it seems breaking all record, as almost everybody holding some position in the society appear to be in great hurry making hay while the sun shines, least caring that it is fast pushing Pakistan financially to a stage of unsustainability. In talks with a Pakistan delegation in Washington, the IMF has approved additional financing for Pakistan, which has taken the total loan up to US $11.3 billion. The new pledges are intended to bridge any gap that may arise if funds pledged to Pakistan at a donor's conference in Tokyo in April do not come in on time. The immediate problem has thus been resolved; the longer-term crisis grows. The IMF deal of course means Pakistan's debt burden continues to mount. The same holds true in the case of loans taken from other sources. The situation is largely unsustainable. A glance at the budgetary pie shows how debt eats away at our resources. We simply cannot afford to dish out an ever-increasing slice to it year after year, decade after decade. The crisis Pakistan faces today is largely rooted in its economy. The socio-economic slide has contributed to the immense sense of grievance and acted to fuel the militant fires. The rising rate of crime, the growing sense of insecurity, the flight of capital, for which another Forex firm, Zarco, is now being investigated, and the damaging human brain drain are all tied in to this factor.To escape the debt trap, we need more resources or drastically cut our expenses instead of the current spree of drawing benefits with arrears by all those restored, hundred percent increase in salaries and perks, after retirement phenomenal increase in benefits and privileges, huge wastage due to negligence and ineptness besides the loot and plunder by all and sundry running into trillions. The issue is can our economy any longer sustain such weird attitude of persons exercising authority, especially when generating resources has it limits.The fact that agriculture has still to be taxed, that many industrialists still pay only the most nominal taxes, while the salaried class bears alone the major burden of tax deductions offers one answer. Our parliamentarians must look beyond their own interests and look at those of their country and its people. In the past, calling upon Pakistanis based abroad to send back remittances has proved the most effective means of raising finance. This can be attempted again. The vast Pakistani diaspora has time and again proved it is both extremely patriotic and generous. But it would be unrealistic to call upon it to send money home in a climate of continued political instability. The government must focus on building the confidence needed to bring in investment and halt the continued slide of the rupee against the dollar. Pakistan's potential for exports has not been realized. There should be some assessment too of why we have lost our status as a major ship-breaking centre and why other spheres in which we once competed with the world have slipped.

Sugar crisis: Confusion worse confounded

Notwithstanding, the twists and turns of the governments at Islamabad and Lahore, the suo motto hectic activities at the high courts in Lahore, Peshawar and Karachi and of late, the Supreme Court of Pakistan being seized with the situation reprimanding and rebuking the Pakistan Sugar Mills Association and the Punjab government, there seems to be no relief to the people, as the sugar crisis, which had erupted weeks ago last Ramazan, fast drifted from bad to worse, piling miseries to the people left unprotected to the profiteers and exploiters fleecing them at will.The Supreme Court of Pakistan directed the government on Friday to issue a notification setting the price of sugar at Rs40 per kilogramme across the country until the submission of a report by a proposed inquiry commission.The court also formed the commission it proposed earlier, and appointed Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) Chairman Khalid Mirza to head the body, authorising him to work out the cost of production and mill owners’ profit. Meanwhile, CCP Chairman Khalid Mirza said Friday we are in the middle of an investigation and the raids were conducted on the three sugar mills, while the preliminary investigations found out that it smacks of irregularities in the sugar price. However about the sugar price fixation, Chairman CCP said that he would only suggest the Supreme Court what should the appropriate price be, otherwise, price determination is not the job of CCP. Reacting to the apex court rebuke for filing an appeal against an LHC decision that sugar be sold at Rs40 a kilogram and stress it should have focused on ensuring this happened instead of challenging the verdict, the Punjab government has taken over sugar mills. According to a report, government officials have been deployed in the mills, while police contingents have been sent to guard the mills’ gates. Sugar Dealers Association Chairman Asghar Butt said uncertainty prevailed in the sugar market after the sugar mills failed to offer a single bag for sale. Chaudhry Abdul Waheed, a former executive committee member of the Sugar Mills Association, said they were helpless in the face of the Punjab government’s action. “We will not sell sugar at Rs40 even if the government takes away all of our stocks,” the report quoted him saying. Consumers out in the market in search of sugar complained its non-availability in the open market even at the whimsically asking price, as the stockholders and wholesalers have held back the supply altogether since the announcement of the court order, while the rising pressure and short supply at the government-run utility stores, buying two kilo sugar bag standing in the never-ending queue is a full-time job of a man with special stamina and patience.

Oil eases in Asian trade

SINGAPORE: Crude prices were hovering below 74 dollars in Asian trade Tuesday as oil markets eased off 10-month highs, driven by a strengthening US dollar and dips in Asian equity markets, analysts said. New York's main contract, light sweet crude for October delivery, was down 39 cents to 73.98 dollars a barrel in morning trade. Brent North Sea crude for October delivery was down 27 cents to 73.92 dollars. Japanese share prices fell 0.78 percent in morning trade as investors took profits a day after a strong rally driven by mounting optimism on the global economic picture. Crude prices continued to fall after a pre-weekend surge last week and Shum warned that the market would remain fickle in the near term.

“Triple Space” offers web for web services

What the World Wide Web is to humans, the Triple Space could become for machines, say European researchers who have helped lay the foundations for this innovative integration of web services, semantic web and tuple space technologies.
As a new form of network-based, machine-machine communication, the roll out of Triple Space technology heralds a new era for the internet in which computers are able to publish and read information just as humans create and browse webpages.
By using semantic web technology to make information understandable by computers and expressing that knowledge as basic atomic units called tuples, the Triple Space enables web services to make use of true web communication instead of the email-like point-to-point exchange of messages common today. As such, it promises to provide faster, more efficient and more secure web services and distributed applications to a wide variety of sectors, from telecommunications and e-commerce to air traffic control and healthcare.

Putting the ‘web’ in web services

“Despite their name, web services today aren’t very ‘webby’,” says Elena Simperl, a senior researcher at the Semantic Technology Institute (STI) of the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
“The way they communicate is more like email in which messages are sent and received between machines rather than true asynchronous web communication in which information is published and becomes persistently available to be read at any time,” she explains.
STI coordinated the EU-funded TripCom project, a pioneering initiative that has successfully proven the Triple Space concept and implemented the technology to make the World Wide Web for machines a reality.
“When we started our research in 2004 and 2005 it wasn’t a very popular idea. But we have seen that the world has evolved in our direction as more and more software services have been put on the web and cloud computing has become the talk of the moment with companies, such as Google and Amazon, releasing cloud computing products and services,” adds Simperl.
Though similar in concept to cloud computing, in which computational resources are distributed and provided as a service over the internet, the Triple Space deals with data – offering a simple, scalable way for machines to share information asynchronously.
To create the Triple Space, the TripCom researchers worked on making web services and the data they use understandable by computers, using semantic web technologies to communicate machine-readable knowledge rather than raw data. The team opted for the Resource Description Framework or RDF format, which represents data and the semantics of data in triples of the form “subject-property-object” in order to build statements of knowledge.
Information is then published in tuple spaces, shared virtual data-spaces designed for concurrent access by multiple processes and applications in which data units are generally expressed as tuples, a mathematical unit referring to an ordered list of finite length.
Just as multiple human web surfers can view webpages hosted on the same or different servers at any time, information stored in the Triple Space is “persistently published” – meaning it is always available for any application with access to read it or, if permitted, change it. In contrast, most current web services require the sender and receiver of data to have a same-time synchronous connection to each other, to agree on a data format, to know each other and share a common representation.
“Triple Space is the same paradigm as the web where information is published, stored and read persistently but instead of being used by humans it is used by machines,” Simperl notes. And, just as humans can access the same webpage with different web browsers and different operating systems, computers are able to publish and read information in the Triple Space without format, process or technical constraints.

Federer downs Djokovic to win Cincinnati Masters

CINCINNATI: World number one Roger Federer defeated fourth-seeded Novak Djokovic 6-1, 7-5 to win the Cincinnati Masters title Sunday and cement his status as favorite for the upcoming US Open. Federer set the tone in the second game of the match, when Djokovic saved six break points but still couldn't ward off the break of serve. When Djokovic finally held serve in the sixth game of the match he could only look at the sky and smile. He presented a tougher challenge in the second set but couldn't capitalize on a set point in the 10th game. Federer earned the key break for a 6-5 lead before serving out the match with a love game. Federer won his third Cincinnati title after victories here in 2005 and 2007. He also captured his 16th Masters crown - second only to Andre Agassi's career total of 17 in the elite series. He turned the tables on Djokovic, who had beaten him in two prior meetings this season. More importantly, the five-time defending US Open champion showed he is on form with the last Grand Slam of the season scheduled to start at Flushing Meadows on August 31. After capturing the Masters title in Madrid, Federer posted milestone victories at Roland Garros and Wimbledon this year. His first French Open title made him just the sixth man to complete a career Grand Slam and his triumph over Andy Roddick in an epic Wimbledon final gave him a record 15th career Grand Slam. After taking a break as he and wife, Mirka, welcomed the birth of twin daughters, Federer then suffered a shock quarter-final defeat at the Montreal Masters against France's Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.

FoDP Business Community meeting held

ISTANBUL: A meeting of the business community held here on Monday to attract entrepreneurs from Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FoDP) members countries for investment in coal, wind and hydro power projects in Pakistan.The Foreign Economic Relations Borad, the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey hosted the meeting. The meeting explored the avenues of public private partnerships for the realization of various projects on fast-track basis with a special attention to the energy and infrastructure sectors. Taking into consideration the vast opportunities offered by Pakistan, the discussions at the Business Community’s Meeting dwelled upon the energy and infrastructure development sector.