Pakistan Needs To Set Up University For Management Of Water Resources: Director UNESCO

BEIJING, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Nov, 2023) 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, the Director, of UNESCO Regional Office for East Asia, Prof Shahbaz Khan said.

“Pakistani and Chinese governments could work together on the model of Hohai University in Nanjing, one of the higher education institutions dealing with rivers and oceans in China, to establish such a university in Pakistan to promote river culture,” he said in an interview with APP on the sidelines of the Yangtze Culture Forum recently held in Nanjing, China.

He said that in Pakistan, archaeological sites like Mohenjodaro, Harappa and Taxila were linked with rivers and are believed to be older than many other cultures including the 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.

He 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 which depend on water.

Prof Shahbaz, 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 of the price went double.

“Pakistani scientists should visit China under exchange programs 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 could they grow more rice with less water as it is a big challenge for Pakistan because of the food security.

Pakistan like China could also bring quality education and water knowledge through our centres in Punjab and especially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), Gilgit-Baltistan having 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.

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.

APP/asg