Pakistan Needs to Invest Water Resources Education: UNESCO Director

APP

Beijing: Pakistan should learn from China’s experience and work together to set up a university covering water resources engineering, environmental science, and engineering for water management resources in the country, UNESCO Regional Office for East Asia Prof Shahbaz Khan said on Tuesday.

He proposed collaboration between the Pakistani and Chinese governments to replicate the model of institutions like Hohai University in Nanjing, known for its expertise in river and ocean studies, within Pakistan.

This initiative aims to advance the understanding and preservation of river culture, drawing parallels between Pakistan’s historical sites such as Mohenjodaro, Harappa, and Taxila, which are intricately linked with river systems and predate various cultures, including China’s Yangtze culture.

As the river culture in Pakistan has been facing challenges, there is an urgent need to impose a ban on fishing to protect blind dolphins along the lower catches of the Indus River, he added.

Pakistan could learn from China for industrial development by setting up small and medium enterprises that depend on water: Prof Shahbaz

Shahbaz Khan said that cities like Lahore, Multan, and Hyderabad are located along the rivers in Punjab and Sindh provinces, respectively, and Pakistan could learn from China for industrial development by setting up small and medium enterprises that depend on water.

Prof Khan, who has been working in China for the last 20 years, said that there was less water available along the Yangtze River, especially in areas close to Wuhan, a central city in China, where the water level available for irrigation went down by more than 30% but the level of production went double.

Pakistani scientists should visit China under exchange programmes to learn how the scientists here do it, he added.

He commended the efforts of the scientists at the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) as well as in Sindh and Punjab provinces and opined that they need to come to China to learn how they could grow more rice with less water, as it is a big challenge for Pakistan because of food security. 

Pakistani scientists should visit China to learn how to grow more rice with less water:Prof Shahbaz

Pakistan, like China, could also bring quality education and water knowledge through our centres in Punjab, especially Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, which has all the headwaters, he added.

Prof Shahbaz also strongly recommended that Pakistan focus more on technical and vocational education to help create employment opportunities for the jobless youth in Pakistan. “We should also work hard to create new, small, and medium enterprises using our culture and creativity,” he added.

In response to a question, he said that Pakistan should take concrete measures to further promote online shopping, like in China. For example, small farmers and shop owners could produce videos and put their products online.

“We need to learn from the e-commerce experience of China by linking more and more people together,” he added.