The Punjab cabinet has approved the headline features of a Punjab industrial export programme valued at Rs1.995 trillion and targeted at more than 162,000 jobs. Senior Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb presented it to the 37th cabinet meeting, chaired by Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif.
The number the cabinet actually controls is smaller. Of the Rs1.995 trillion, Rs1.089 trillion is the provincial government’s share and Rs906 billion is expected from the private sector — money that has been forecast rather than committed.
How the headline figure is built
- Total programme value: Rs1.995 trillion
- Provincial government share: Rs1.089 trillion, or 54.6 percent
- Private sector share: Rs906 billion, or 45.4 percent
- Jobs targeted: more than 162,000
- Implied total investment per job: about Rs12.3 million
- Implied public investment per job: about Rs6.7 million
Rs12.3 million of investment per job is high, and it is not by itself a criticism. Industrial infrastructure is capital-intensive, a processing park or a testing laboratory serves firms beyond those it directly employs, and job counts in programmes like this typically exclude induced employment. But it does indicate that this is an asset-building programme rather than an employment scheme, and it should be judged on the assets.
What is actually in it
The programme spans industrial infrastructure, cluster development, export competitiveness, value-chain transformation and mechanisation in agriculture and livestock, delivered partly through public-private partnerships.
The specific commitments are more informative than the headings. Testing and certification facilities are planned for leather, footwear and sports goods; material-testing laboratories for cutlery, handmade tools, ceramics and fans; agriculture processing parks at Sargodha, Khanewal, Okara and Bhakkar; export financing for horticulture and floriculture; and value enhancement across wheat, meat and milk chains, citrus, potato and mango.
Those sectors are not chosen at random. They are the ones where Punjab already exports and where the binding constraint is certification rather than capacity — a Sialkot surgical-instrument or sports-goods manufacturer loses orders because a buyer requires a test certificate it cannot obtain locally, not because it cannot make the product.
Related: Pharmaceutical exports hit a three-year low of $319m
Testing capacity is the unglamorous part that matters
Pakistani exporters across several sectors have made the same complaint this year: the obstacle to selling into regulated markets is conformity assessment. Pharmaceutical manufacturers cited slow foreign registration and delayed facility inspections as the reason markets stayed closed. Textile exporters have pointed at cost rather than capability.
Domestic testing laboratories address part of that, but only part, and the distinction is worth being precise about. A local lab removes the cost and delay of sending samples abroad. It does not by itself produce a certificate an EU or US buyer will accept — that requires the laboratory to be accredited by a body those buyers recognise, which is a separate and slower process than building the facility.
Nothing in the announcement addresses accreditation. It is the step that determines whether these laboratories produce market access or only convenience.
The agriculture half, and a signal from the tractor queue
The same cabinet meeting approved Rs9.5 billion in subsidies for 10,000 high-powered tractors under Phase V of the Green Tractor Programme, following a Phase IV covering 10,000 low-powered machines. More than 250,000 applications were received.
That is 25 applicants for every subsidised tractor, and it says two things at once. Demand for mechanisation is far beyond what the scheme supplies, and a subsidy rationed at four percent of applicants allocates a valuable benefit by a process worth scrutinising — 240,000 farmers will be told no.
It also corroborates something visible in the national sales data. Tractor sales rose 38 percent in the first quarter of FY27, with September alone up 130 percent year on year. Farmers are buying machinery, with or without a subsidy.
A province doing industrial policy
Industrial and trade policy in Pakistan has historically been federal. Tariffs, import rules, export facilitation schemes and the duty drawback regime are all set in Islamabad, and the complaints exporters have aired this year — about the Export Facilitation Scheme, about regulatory duties, about the Engineering Development Board’s import notifications — are federal complaints.
What a province can do is supply what sits beneath the policy: land, industrial estates, power connections, laboratories, skills training and processing infrastructure. That is what this programme consists of, and the division of labour is coherent rather than duplicative.
The limitation follows from the same logic. If a Punjab exporter’s problem is an electricity tariff, an import rule or a refund stuck at the FBR, nothing in Rs1.995 trillion of provincial infrastructure resolves it. The programme improves the inputs available to firms that are already competitive; it cannot change the terms on which they trade.
What has not been published
No timeline has been given. No export target has been attached, which for an export promotion programme is the omission that matters most — without one there is no figure against which Rs1.995 trillion can later be assessed.
Nor is it clear over how many years the provincial Rs1.089 trillion is spread, or what mechanism is expected to draw in the private Rs906 billion. Public-private partnership is named as the vehicle; the terms on which private capital participates are what determine whether it arrives.
The cabinet approved key features, not a costed plan. The detail that would make this assessable — annual allocations, sector-level targets, accreditation partners — sits in documents that have not been released.
