This
week our Cover Story is not about the mass IT awareness making rounds
across Pakistan. It is rather an attempt to qualify and categorise
this unparalleled awareness and to use it as a springboard to catapult
us, as a nation, into the cyberspace age in practise instead of
theory. By now Pakistanis are seem to be bitten by the IT bug. They
seem to be running high IT fever obvious from its being the first, and
in most cases the only, academic choice for the majority of high
school students and the most preferred career option for their
counterparts in colleges, universities and vocational institutes.
HBL
The
Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS)-2001, offered by the management of
Habib Bank has stirred over 22,000 HBL employees. Majority of the
staff is reluctant to go for VSS. Implementation of the scheme however
seems to be inevitable if the bank has to be privatized. This scheme
was earlier confined to the staff who joined the bank in August 1991
which has been extended to the willing irrespective to the duration of
the employment period. The executives/ officers who will opt for VSS
will also be allowed incentives of increase in salary for calculation
of the dues.
WAPDA
WAPDA's
request for increase in tariff has once again being resisted. Not
because consumers do not understand the impact of increase in fuel
cost but because the utility has been failing in improving efficiency,
curtailing T&D losses and controlling wide spread corruption. The
consumers alone are not responsible for power theft. It is being done
only in connivance with WAPDA staff.
