AT long last, the 10th Joint Coordination Committee (JCC) meeting on China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been held, though virtually, with the two countries agreeing to widen the scope of the historic initiative to the mutual benefit.
Pakistan and China also signed several agreements of cooperation in different areas with Planning Minister Asad Umar emphasizing that CPEC has passed the first stage of a few big projects and was now spreading to the overall economy where investment decisions would be made by individual companies.
The JCC is an important forum that discusses substantial issues and makes crucial decisions on CPEC but its planned meeting in July could not be held due to an unfortunate terrorist act in which several Chinese nationals working on the Dasu project were killed.
The incident highlighted the scale and intensity of conspiracies against CPEC and the need for beefing up security for projects as well as the manpower working on them.
Therefore, the JCC rightly focused on the security aspect with the Pakistan side conveying to China that a strong plan of action has been devised to further enhance security measures and a special China-specific cell created in the Ministry of Interior for the purpose.
The fact that over half of foreign investment in Pakistan is coming from China, there is definitely a need to chalk out and implement a robust plan to foil designs of some foreign forces that are bent upon doing mischief.
Apart from security issues, the overall implementation of the CPEC initiative also needs to be discussed in a threadbare manner identifying loopholes and taking timely decisions to accelerate the pace of physical progress.
Though a press release issued by the Ministry of Planning claimed that the CPEC has entered into its second phase focusing on industrial, scientific, technological and agricultural cooperation but decisions taken by the JCC do not reflect the aspirations of the people of Pakistan, who want approval of more specific projects and programmes to help accelerate the pace of socio-economic progress in different parts of the country.
The JCC was silent on vital projects like ML-I, industrial zones and overall development of Gwadar.
The Pakistan side should sort out issues internally and then take them up in a substantive manner with China as state of indecision and delay push the cost of the projects up.
