South Asia Investor Review

It takes an Indian minimum wage worker twice as long to afford an Apple iPhone 12 as his Pakistani counterpart. A minimum wage Pakistani has to work 1,642 hours, or about 10 months of work, to buy an iPhone 12, according to Bloomberg News . An Indian minimum worker, on the other hand, must work nearly twice as long, a total of 3,254 hours, to buy it.  It takes 1,791 hours in Indonesia and 2,045 hours in Egypt. Assuming a 40-hour work-week and two weeks of vacation, there are 2,000 hours of work in a year. Given these figures, it can be safely assumed that very few minimum wage workers in the developing world can afford to buy an iPhone 12.   Hours of Work Needed to Buy iPhone 12. Source: Bloomberg Bloomberg reported the following on February 4 as follows: "Based on minimum wage levels, a new report from Grover.com estimates it would take 6,639 hours for a Venezuelan to earn enough for the prized smartphone and 3,254 hours for an Indian. Chinese people must work 680 hours ...

Our Next Energy (ONE), a two-year-old Michigan startup founded by Pakistani-American Mujeeb Ijaz, has received $25 million in initial investment from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and German automaker BMW. Storage battery technology is a key area of innovation to bring about  clean energy revolution .   Mujeeb Ijaz has engineered a way to achieve longer ranges for electric vehicles from lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries, a more stable but less powerful chemistry than the nickel-based batteries currently used by most automakers. Mujeeb's brother  Mansoor Ijaz  made headlines in 2011 when he wrote a Financial Times Op Ed regarding his conversations with Husain Haqqani who was serving as Pakistan's ambassador in Washington. Mujeeb's father Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz was a Pakistani experimental physicist and a professor of physics at Virginia Tech.   Mujeeb Ijaz, Founder CEO of Our Next Energy (ONE) Mujeeb Ijaz,  Pakistani-American  fou...

Dr Saiba Varma, Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California in San Diego (UCSD), has recently been under fire for hiding her familial ties to to a top RAW official while working on her book "The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir".  “As an upper-caste and upper-class Indian citizen and subject, I have actively and passively internalized  anti-Muslim  racism my entire life. I am complicit in the colonization of Kashmir and other regions  forcibly incorporated  into the Indian nation-state", she acknowledges in her book released last year.   Dr. Saiba Verma “Borrowing and extending techniques from British colonial rule, the Indian state enacted the world’s most established, sophisticated, and pervasive systems of emergency rule and legislation and repeatedly criminalized pro-independence demands as ‘conspiracies’ and ‘anti-national.’ The Indian state’s global image as ‘the world’s largest democracy,’ a generous aid donor,...

On November 9, 2021, the United States, the world's most vocal supporter of human rights, voted against a United Nations committee's draft on the right to food which passed by 180 votes in favor to 2 against (Israel, United States). The UN committee expressed alarm that in 2020, "the number of people lacking access to adequate food rose by 320 million ‑ to 2.4 billion ‑ amounting to nearly a third of the world’s population, and that between 720 million and 811 million people faced  hunger ". Currently, the hunger situation in Afghanistan is the most acute with over half the population suffering from extreme levels of hunger. Afghanistan has been subjected to US sanctions since the  US loss to the Taliban  in 2021.  UN Vote on Food as Human Right  “Hunger is a violation of human dignity”, Cuba’s delegate said while addressing the  UN Committee meeting . Presenting the draft, he voiced concern that the United States has blocked consensus on the text for four ...

In a long investigative report titled "The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon" published today, the New York Times has revealed that the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi bought the Pegasus spyware as part of a 2017 $2 billion deal he signed with then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Israeli NSO Pegasus Spyware Here's the relevant excerpt of the New York Times report on Modi-Netanyahu deal: "In July 2017, Narendra Modi, who won office on a platform of Hindu nationalism, became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. For decades, India had maintained a policy of what it called “commitment to the Palestinian cause,” and relations with Israel were frosty. The Modi visit, however, was notably cordial, complete with a carefully staged moment of him and Prime Minister Netanyahu walking together barefoot on a local beach. They had reason for the warm feelings. Their countries had agreed on the sale of a package of sophisticated weapons an...

In 1999, President Pervez Musharraf inherited a massive debt of over 100% of GDP run up by the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) governments in 1990s. Musharraf's policies not only revived the bankrupt economy but also brought down debt to 52% of GDP by 2007.  Pakistan Debt to GDP 1995-2021. Source: IMF PPP Government's 2008 Letter to IMF: In a letter to the International Monetary Fund in 2008, the PPP government hailed Musharraf's economic record without mentioning his name in the following words: "Pakistan's economy witnessed a major economic transformation in the last decade (2000-2008). The country's real GDP increased from $60 billion to $170 billion, with per capita income rising from under $500 to over $1000 during 2000-07.....the volume of international trade increased from $20 billion to nearly $60 billion. The improved macroeconomic performance enabled Pakistan to re-enter the international capital markets in the mid-2000s....

Nuclear power plants in Pakistan generated 15,540 GWH of electricity in 2021, a jump of 66% over 2020. Overall, Pakistan's power plants produced 136,572 GWH of power, an increase of 10.6% over 2020, indicating  robust economic recovery  amid the COVID19 pandemic.  Pakistan Electric Power Generation. Source: Arif Habib Hydroelectric dams contributed 37,689 GWH of electricity or 27.6% of the total power generated, making hydropower the biggest contributor to power generated in the country. It is followed by coal (20%), LNG (19%) and nuclear (11.4%).  Cost Per Unit of Electricity in Pakistan. Source: Arif Habib Nuclear offers the lowest cost of fuel for electricity (one rupee per KWH) while furnace oil is the most expensive (Rs. 22.2 per KWH).  Pakistan Electric Power Generation Fuel MiX. Source: Arif Habib Construction of 1,100 MW nuclear power reactor  K2 unit in Karachi  was completed by China National Nuclear Corporation in 2019, according to  me...