DVDs and YouTube videos are at the heart of Learntive, a Silicon Valley NEDians' initiative to promote better learning among school students in Pakistan.…

World's tallest building for Karachi is back on track with Bahria Town's Malik Riaz signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with German-American real estate tycoon Thomas Kramer. Riaz brought in Kramer after his earlier deal with Abu Dhabi Group collapsed soon after signing about three weeks ago. Both Riaz and Kramer have an established track record for…

Pakistan ranks number 3, after US (#1) and India (#2), in terms of freelancers doing outsourced IT work on contract. Bangladesh ranks fourth, according to data from four biggest online outsourcing sites:  Elance.com, oDesk.com, Freelancer.com, and Guru.com.…

A 12-year-old Pakistani girl is taking advance online classes offered by Stanford University. The youngest Microsoft certified professional is a Pakistani. Young Pakistanis are setting records with straight A's on O level and A…

Bahria Town and Abu Dhabi Group agreed to invest $45 billion in real estate in Pakistan. After signing the investment deal, Malik Riaz and Shaikh al-Nahyan announced that Karachi, not Dubai nor Shanghai, will soon boast having the world's tallest building.…

Unlike most western accounts of Pakistani nuclear program which begin and end with A.Q. Khan's network,  Brig Feroz H. Khan's  scholarly work "Eating Grass" offers a very comprehensive story of the "Making of The Pakistani Bomb". Feroz Khan takes the reader through the interdisciplinary nature and the inherent complexity of what it takes to develop, build and operationalize a nuclear weapons arsenal.…

Khadija Niazi, a 12-year old from Lahore, Pakistan, is taking online courses offered by a new wave of cyber-based educational platforms like Coursera and Udacity.  She was recently interviewed by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman at World Economic Forum 2013 at Davos, Switzerland.…

Latest funding of Ashar Aziz's FireEye and Zia Yusuf's Streetline rank #1 and #4 among top 5 VC deals in Silicon Valley announced in January 2013, according to Silicon Valley Business Journal.…

Karachi Fashion Week 2013 is yet another illustration of the fact that life goes on in Pakistan in spite of the terror and violence that makes daily headlines. It's a testament to Pakistanis' extraordinary resilience and great capacity to take it all stride. Here are a few pictures of…

In spite of setbacks from the US CIA's fake vaccination scheme in 2011 and the killing of polio workers by the Taliban in 2012, the WHO says Pakistan is on track to be declared polio free in April this year.…

Deadly skirmishes started between Indian and Pakistani forces along LoC in the disputed territory of Kashmir in early January 2013, barely weeks after Pakistan Army doctrine acknowledged domestic militancy as the biggest threat to national security.…

What has caused a sudden and tragic jump in mass casualty attacks in Pakistan with over 200 deaths, mostly of Hazara Shias, in a single day on January 10, 2013? Is it just impunity or blow back from intensified US drone attacks early in 2013 as President Barack Obama accelerates US pull-out from Afghanistan? Or is it lack of national political consensus in…

The year 2012 was a mixed bag. Economy continued its modest recovery with the stock market hitting new records but it was marred by rising civilian casualties and the worsening energy crisis. The coalition government led by the Pakistan Peoples' Party is nearing its full term with a new prime minister and the political parties have begun campaigning for general elections in the first half of 2013.…

Whether it was the bloody Civil War to abolish slavery in America or the Meiji Restoration that transformed feudal Japan into an industrial giant, history tells us that violent conflict has been an integral part of the process of social change.  Pakistan, too, is experiencing a similar violent social revolution. It started well before the terrorist attacks  of 911 and the subsequent US invasions of…

Eclipse of Feudalism in Pakistan

By Arif Hasan

Mechanisation and middlemen: A customised tractor with a trailer full of harvested sugarcane, in Pakistan.…

A 2012 study of 22 nations conducted by Prof Miles Corak for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Development (OECD) has found income

heritability to be greater in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, China and 5 other countries than in Pakistan.



The study's findings, presented by the author in testimony to the US Senate Finance Committee on July 6, 2012, rely on the…