Tasneem Ahmad Siddiqui. Towards Good Governance. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000. 235 pages Hardback. Rs 495.00.

Tasneem Ahmad Siddiqui is a former civil servant who haswritten a book that is in tune with the governance issues being faced byPakistan on a variety of fronts. The author has had much experience ofthe grassroots level and provides the reader a view of the changes atthat level for a dynamic societal change. There is clear evidence of thefaith that he seems to have in the resourcefulness of the people ofPakistan. The hallmark of the book is its concise and easy reading withnot just criticisms but workable solutions that are offered by theauthor. At the outset, the crisis being faced by Pakistan ishighlighted. The author delves into the historical antecedents of thiscrisis, apportioning blame to the Harvard Advisory Group, as it wastheir flawed development strategy with a pro-industry bias that ignoredagriculture. They believed in jump-start modernisation without givingserious consideration to the fact that Pakistan has a strongagricultural base. The stated wisdom of such a policy at that time wasthat surplus labour from agriculture would be shifted to industry andthis would tackle poverty and income inequalities as espoused by the‘trickle-down theory’. This thinking was not an exclusive one, as such astrategy was pursued by policy-makers of many newly independent statesin the post-Second World War era. However, the ensuing importancegranted to profits as opposed to wages in the ‘development decade’resulted in greater inequalities of income, and a greater concentrationof economic resources, whereby twenty-two families came to own 80percent of the banks and 95 percent of the insurance companies.According to the author, what the policy-makers failed to realise,through the import of such a Western model, was that in the long run lowwages would generate low profits.