PTA bans Wikipedia in Pakistan over ‘sacrilegious content’: spokesperson


Irfan Sadozai Published February 4, 2023





— Dawn.com

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has banned popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia in the country for not “blocking/removing sacrilegious content” within the 48-hour deadline given to the website, a spokesperson confirmed on Saturday.

Wikipedia is a free, crowdsourced, editable online encyclopedia often used as a starting point by millions across the world for basic information.

The PTA had on Wednesday degraded Wikipedia services countrywide for not complying with the directives for the removal of controversial content from the website.

The regulator said the website had neither responded to its requests, nor taken down the content in question.

Speaking to Dawn.com, PTA spokesperson Malahat Obaid said the ban had primarily been imposed for non-compliance with the orders.

“The decision can be reviewed once Wikipedia removes sacrilegious content that has been identified by the regulatory authority,” the spokesperson added.

Users are met with “this site cannot be reached” when trying to access the website.

The message one sees when going to Wikipedia.

Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that runs Wikipedia, said it “does not make decisions around what content is included on Wikipedia or how that content is maintained”.

It added that this is “by design to ensure that articles are the result of many people coming together to determine what information should be presented on the site, resulting in richer, more neutral articles”.

“We believe that access to knowledge is a human right. A block of Wikipedia in Pakistan denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to the largest free knowledge repository. If it continues, it will also deprive everyone access to Pakistan’s history and culture,” it said.

It goes on to say: “We hope that the Pakistan government joins with the Wikimedia Foundation in a commitment to knowledge as a human right and restores access to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects promptly, so that the people of Pakistan can continue to receive and share knowledge with the world.”

In a statement earlier this week, the telecom regulator said it had approached Wikipedia to block or remove the content in question by issuing a notice under “applicable law and court order(s)”.

“An opportunity of hearing was also provided, however, the platform neither complied by removing the blasphemous content nor appeared before the authority,” the statement had said.

“Given the intentional failure on part of the platform to comply with the directions of PTA, the services of Wikipedia have been degraded for 48 hours with the direction to block/remove the reported content,” the statement added.

The regulator warned that in case of non-compliance, Wikipedia would be blocked in the country and its restoration would be “reconsidered subjecting to blocking/removal of the reported unlawful content”.

‘Silencing of dissent’

Free speech campaigners have highlighted what they say is a pattern of rising government censorship of print and electronic media.

“There’s just been a concerted effort to exert greater control over content on the internet,” digital rights activist Usama Khilji told AFP. “The main purpose is to silence any dissent. A lot of times blasphemy is weaponised for that purpose.”

Khilji said courts and the regulator must realise that Wikipedia is a “crowd-sourced platform where anyone with an account can edit articles, which they can also do instead of blocking the entire website”.

In a comment to AFP yesterday, he said the ban is “disproportionate, unconstitutional, and quite ridiculous”.

Wielding the ban hammer

This is not the first time the authority has taken notice of objectionable content on the platform. In December 2020, the PTA had issued notices to Wikipedia and Google Inc for “disseminating sacrilegious content”.

Pakistan blocked YouTube from 2012 to 2016. In recent years, the country has also blocked the wildly popular video-sharing app TikTok several times over “indecent” and “immoral” content.

After the deluge, how to build a green recovery in Pakistan

The need to rebuild from the 2022 floods presents Pakistan with an opportunity for a green recovery, starting with a rethink of how economic growth and well-being are measured.

Hashim Zaman Published February 3, 2023  

In our pursuit of narrowly defined economic growth, we are pushing the ecological balance beyond safe boundaries. This can have terrible consequences, as was revealed in Pakistan last year. A third of districts in the country are still dealing with the outcomes of the flooding, and 33 million people have been affected.

Between June and August 2022, Pakistan endured the worst floods in its 75-year history. A prolonged heatwave in the spring, accompanied by a drought and followed by a ‘monster monsoon’ ultimately morphed into the wettest August since 1961. A combination of glacial melt, warming of sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, La Niña, and poor management led to a disaster on a scale never experienced before.

Fields turned into inland lakes as Balochistan and Sindh provinces received 726% and 590% more rainfall than average, respectively. Around 75 glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) were reported in the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan region of northern Pakistan.

The most astonishing feature of Pakistan’s 2022 floods was their origin, having sprung from the Koh-e-Suleman mountain range, which ordinarily do not experience the South Asian monsoon. This is a worrying indicator of a geographical shift in the region’s monsoon patterns.

Measuring, and mismeasuring, loss and damage

Initial estimates of loss and damage resulting from the 2022 Pakistan floods stood at over USD 30 billion, distributed across infrastructure, agriculture and various cross-cutting sectors. Meanwhile the total needs assessment for recovery and reconstruction added a further USD 16.3 billion in estimated costs.

However, this analysis is misleading as it fails to reflect loss and damage beyond direct costs. The intangible reality — the non-economic losses and damages pertaining to our natural capital — along with the opportunity cost of unemployment, lost income and migration, remain largely ignored. Most importantly, the USD 30 billion estimate is a serious undervaluation, and does not account for the damage done to natural ecosystems, and their contributions to well-being and economic activity. These include pollination, carbon sequestration, and climate regulation, all of which have been disrupted by the floods.

Since we do not ‘pay’ nature for these services, they are often overlooked in economic calculations. Globally, these ecosystem services are worth an estimated USD 125-140 trillion annually, more than one-and-a-half times the size of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). And yet they rarely figure in the economic calculations that dominate our planning processes.

GDP is an outdated metric that ignores the health of ecosystems and the critical role of ecosystem services

If not managed properly, by 2050 Pakistan’s annual GDP could decline by an estimated 18-20% as a result of climate risks and environmental degradation. And yet this is again a limited way of approaching the challenge. Correlating climate risks, losses and damages with GDP is misplaced. GDP is an outdated metric of measuring growth, as it fails to account for the inclusive wealth of a nation. In particular, it ignores the health of ecosystems, and the critical role of ecosystem services in supporting human and economic well-being. This limits its ability to track and assess human well-being, and relying on GDP results in misguided growth and development pathways.

In a post-disaster scenario, the case for moving beyond GDP becomes even stronger. Rehabilitation efforts such as rebuilding houses, bridges and roads inflate GDP growth rate in the short term. GDP counts only what is built, not what was lost. This creates an illusion of prosperity. However, in real terms the nation may be much worse off, as the land degradation, deteriorating water quality and biodiversity loss resulting from a disaster can result in a lower contribution to the economy from nature. A decline in the healthy functioning of ecosystems and society results in lower productivity, while leaving all species on Earth more vulnerable to future climate shocks.

New metrics can help a green recovery

Without transformative change in how economic growth and well-being are measured, Pakistan risks blinding itself to the fact that it is growing ever poorer and more vulnerable to future shocks from climate change, recessions and pandemics. Indices such as the Gross Ecosystem Product and the Living Standards Framework, being piloted in China and New Zealand respectively, have shown great promise in tracking and enhancing happiness and well-being across all demographics. This could be explored in the context of Pakistan.

The suffering caused by the 2022 floods brought Pakistan’s climate vulnerability to global attention. At a conference in Geneva in early January, the international community pledged over USD 9 billion to help Pakistan’s flood recovery, in line with the Resilient Recovery, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Framework. As harmonious as this may seem, almost 90% of these commitments are reportedly multilateral aid in the form of loans, which will be rolled out over the next three years. Pakistan already has a huge debt burden, which includes USD 23 billion of external debt repayments due and a USD 10 billion current account deficit forecast for the 2023 fiscal year. Accumulating more debt is far from ideal.

In this scenario, reshaping these funds into debt-for-nature swaps can be explored, where a portion of the debt is cancelled or reduced by the creditor in exchange for the debtor investing in nature. Similarly, nature performance bonds can be leveraged. This is a type of performance-based debt instrument, where the debt is pegged against measurable targets and nature-based outcomes such as ecosystem restoration. These tools accelerate access to climate finance while tackling the growing sovereign debt crisis, and can enable developing states like Pakistan to achieve green growth and enhance biodiversity.

The recent colossal floods, followed by health, energy and economic crises, have left Pakistan in a predicament. But they have also presented it with the opportunity for a green recovery. This is a chance to recharge the country’s aquifers, enhance its stock of natural capital and leapfrog towards a green economy. In this age of adaptation, investing in green infrastructure and nature-based solutions such as inclusive early warning systems and ecosystem restoration can enable green growth, and create a nature-positive, megadiverse and climate-resilient Pakistan.

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This article was originally published on The Third Pole 

PAKISTAN
Traders threaten nationwide protests if new taxes imposed

Kalbe Ali 

ISLAMABAD: Traders have threatened to launch a nationwide protest if the government imposes a fresh wave of taxes to fulfil International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditions and demanded that the government instead cut salaries of army generals, judges and parliamentarians.

Talking to the media in Islamabad on Saturday, representatives of the Markazi Tanzeem Tajiran (Central Organisation of Traders) of Pakistan said they would launch a protest movement across the country from Feb 13 if new taxes were introduced.

The organisation’s leaders warned the rulers that the country’s economic situation had left no room for burdening the general public and the trading community with more duties.

They expressed dismay that the state of the economy of a nuclear country was in dire straits and the situation was worsening with each passing day, and said that the public should not suffer because of the “flaws or crimes committed by the leaders of this country”.

“Our reaction will be severe if more taxes worth billions of rupees were imposed, as being reported in the media,” Kashif Chaudhry, the organisation’s president, said, asking the stakeholders, including the ruling elites, to make “sane decisions” if they want to improve the economy.

Call for reducing salaries of army generals, judges and parliamentarians

Calling for a reduction in expenses incurred on the president, prime minister, legislators, judges, army officers and bureaucrats should be reduced, Mr Chaudhry said the government should cut all “non-productive expenditures” immediately by half.

The traders’ representatives demanded the government formulate long-term and short-term economic policies and should ensure income tax collection from all sectors instead of imposing billions in taxes.

“I assure the government that the business community was ready to contribute to steering the country out of the current economic crises and we traders are ready to pay fixed taxes,” he said.

Khawaja Salman Siddiqui, the organisation’s chairman, said criticised Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, who he said was brought in by the PML-N to control the economy and stop the rupee’s downfall, but he failed to do the job.

Mr Siddiqui said putting an artificial cap on the dollar’s rate led to a wide gap between the interbank and open market rates, and despite the demand to remove the cap, Mr Dar “remained stubborn and did not listen to anybody”.

Other speakers called for the implementation of the decision of the Federal Shariat Court to make Pakistan’s economy interest-free to “eradicate exploitation in the system”.

However, they also suggested an amnesty scheme to let the rich bring their foreign wealth home; the government can then take loans from these affluent people and give them profits instead of taking loans from the IMF and the World Bank on harsh conditions.

Published in Dawn, February 5th, 2023