Realistic Economic Indicators.

Briefly speaking about sectoral performance for want of adequate space, the agriculture sector during FY2022 recorded a remarkable growth of 4.40 percent surpassing the target of 3.5 percent and last year's growth of 3.48 percent. This growth was mainly driven by high yields, attractive output prices and supportive government policies, better availability of certified seeds, pesticides and agriculture credit.

Livestock has a share of 61.89 percent in agriculture and 14.04 percent in the GDP, recorded a growth of 3.26 percent in 2021-22 compared to 2.38 percent during the same period last year.

The domestic production of fertilisers during July-March FY 2022 increased by 1.9 percent over the same period of last year mainly due to the running of two Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) based plants, FatimaFert and Agritech limited from September 2021 to March 2022. The import of fertiliser also decreased by 6.2 percent during the period under review.

The performance of the Large-Scale Manufacturing (LSM) sector stood tremendously high with 10.4 percent during July-March FY2022 as compared to the growth of only 4.2 percent during the same period last year. This could easily be attributed to prudent measures and continuous support of the government with rising global demand, easy access to credit and partially subsidised energy supplies which helped in boosting the business sentiments and achieving higher growth of the LSM sector.

As regards the transport and communications sector, presently Pakistan has 48 national highways and strategic roads with a total length of 14480 kilometres. In the first quarter of 2022, PIA added two airbuses A320 in its fleet, Pakistan Railways comprised a total of 488 Locomotives for a 7791 Km route across the country.

China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) quite rightly is being described as a flagship and most actively implemented project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) where Pakistan and China have successfully launched as many as 56 projects in different sectors across the country on the ground. Out of these projects, 26 projects worth approximately US $17 billion have since been completed and 30 projects worth $8 billion are under construction.

The federal government is taking due benefit from Pakistan's strategic location and has accordingly focused on developing an efficient and well-integrated transport and communication system by connecting remote regions of the country into one road, one Asia...