A lot of foreign investment was there in services and telecommunications section, and as an immediate result, Mobile manufacturers found a new market for their mobiles, multinational operators started operation in Pakistan. You don’t have the money to buy a cigarette, all you get from your pocket is a couple of coins, but you have 3-4 SIMMs and a latest camera phone and 2-3 credit cards in your pocket. This is development.
However, “development comes at a price” and this looks true:
Poor policies for power production has encouraged industries to generate electricity from natural gas during past decades and thus we are running out of our gas reservoirs. We must import gas to meet our needs and that gas will be pretty expensive. This means our stoves will soon be “out of fuel”, as all available gas will finish within a span of few years and imported gas will be out of reach for most. But some part of this gas is used to keep our handsets operational, so it is not bad.
Forests are cut every day by Land developers, and trees are already hard to find in big cities. If our natural gas reservoirs are finished and we have to import gas that we might not afford to use in home appliances (due to its price), we will not have the option to cook on wood, as well.
We have atomic energy that was never used to generate electricity to satisfy the need of industries, but government can provide us “nuclear stoves” and we can still afford some food. But this is some sort of dream.
Any ways, we live in a free country and our government pays for the air we use. We can connect to the net, we can make calls, we can tune-in channels. If government don’t want us to cook and eat, then we must accept it as there are still many things that we get for free.