HYDERABAD:
Although the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has been supporting the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government at the centre, it feels that the latter’s policies lack a vision to address the looming problems of climate change. and grant digital rights to citizens. .
PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, while addressing the convocation of Sindh University in Jamshoro on Monday, launched a broadside against the government, urging the youth to support it to secure their digital rights.
“They [the rulers] They are afraid that they will end up using the Internet collectively. [based platforms] and demand their rights,” he told the Convocation, after delving into the history lesson, how rulers throughout the centuries tried to control the population.
“Attempts are being made to control and censor the country’s digital landscape,” he warned, referring to recent problems such as slowing internet speeds and blocking of virtual private networks (VPNs).
The PPP chairman said that bandwidth, fiber optic cables and wireless Internet services serve as modern infrastructure tools, like rivers, sea, roads, ports, highways, airports and industry that arose in previous centuries.
“Affordable and equitable access to the Internet should be a fundamental right for citizens,” Bilawal said, but at the same time added that strict protocols to prevent misinformation and the safety and mental health of people were also essential.
Bilawal proposed a digital bill of rights of the people, saying that Islamabad rulers were not affected by any disruption in internet services because they rarely use them unlike students and common man.
“I think that in our time we need a digital rights law,” he said, asking academia and young people to connect with him and send him their proposals for the law. He said academia was better prepared to draft the law, compared to politicians or bureaucrats, who were less versed in the use of the Internet.
With the bill prepared and drafted, the PPP chairman promised that he would confront all dissenting voices in Islamabad, which he believed would certainly resist such a law, to introduce the digital rights legislation in parliament.
Bilawal encouraged youth to act as society’s vanguards for political change, attributing the political achievements of his grandfather, former prime minister and PPP founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and his mother, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to political activism during his youth.
Climate change
Bilawal believed that the young generation was qualified to make decisions about the country’s long-term policies, because only the youth could seriously think about their future and “only they could free themselves” from the shackles of the past.
Bilawal also mentioned climate change as a serious threat to future generations and criticized the government for its lack of vision regarding this challenge. He said the current Public Sector Development Program (PSDP) lacked the capacity to address the climate problem.
“I believe that keeping in mind climate change, Pakistan should dismantle its entire PSDP and should create a new PSDP, keeping in mind the environmental problems and possible solutions,” Bilawal said in the call.
He believed that the root cause of a non-functional PSDP and the provincial Annual Development Plan (ADP) was people over the age of 60 or 70, who made the decisions. “The preparations they are making are only for the next five to ten years,” he said.
“And honestly, they’re not thinking about you.” [students’] future and that of their children,” added the president of the PPP. “The only thing they want is to approve the next budget and, consequently, they make projects on paper.”
He said that a provision had been inserted in the 26th Amendment to make environment a fundamental right. He believed that with the help of academia and youth, the government would have to build climate resilient infrastructure, green infrastructure, and green and organic energy projects.
The PPP’s unequivocal opposition to the construction of six canals from the Indus River also found a fleeting mention in Bilawal’s speech, who felt that the project seemed to lack the predominant water availability in the river and assess the imminent climate threats.
The PPP chairman blamed the PML-N government for continuing to use expensive imported fuel to generate electricity, but at the same time denied Sindh to harness its wind, solar and coal power to produce clean and cheaper electricity.
“This is such a big joke… that they say they have excess electricity and that’s why they don’t allow us [Sindh] “To produce solar, wind or coal energy,” he said. He refuted that power distribution companies had stopped load shedding, saying they could prove this claim if any federal minister visited the cities of Sindh.
Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah also briefly addressed the convocation during which degrees were awarded to students of 2019 to 2023 batches.
