Earlier, the Minister for Labour, Manpower and Overseas Pakistanis, Abdus Sattar Lalika, had recalled that as a follow-up to the Prime Minister's address to the nation last year, his ministry had embarked upon special efforts, leading among other developments, to the lifting of ban on the import of Pakistani workers in a number of countries, including Malaysia, Kuwait and Oman.
As for the possibilities of more successes in this endeavour, he gave the happy tidings of the shortly expected visit of the Saudi Labour Minister to Pakistan with a view to exploring the prospects of further increase in manpower import from this country.
However, the improvement in the situation from multi-directional efforts over the recent years as lately recorded still leaves a lot more to be desired, in so for as the restoration of Pakistan's enviable position in manpower export is concerned and which Pakistan started losing way back in the turbulent 1990s.
Understandable, of course, should be the Prime Minister's urge for regaining the country's lost manpower market, particularly in the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries and in the near and distant lands during the boom decades of the 1970s and 80s that had come to be popularly identified as the Dubai syndrome.
It will recalled that marking continuity with the emergence of a steadily growing job market for Pakistanis in the industrial centres of Britain in the 1950s and 60s, the oil boom in the Middle East had thrown open a whole new vista of lucrative employment opportunities for the skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers from this country.
It will, however, be noted that the blessings of those prosperous decades were more in the nature of a windfall instead of the fruit of any objectively planned effort on the part of the government.
The credit for its exploration and exploitation can be traced to the private sector pioneers, evidently with some experience in hunting for job opportunities and making money out of it on commercial lines.
It is, however, just another matter, that the governments of those days had to step in to regularise the booming business of job provision to curb malpractices and exploitation of the gullible workers, on the one hand, and to tap the trade for revenue-earning prospects, at the same time.
Moreover, numerous measures were adopted, including incentives for import of a whole range of durable consumer goods by the expatriate workers out of their savings.
It goes without saying that these incentives proved instrumental in developing a fast growing market of electronic goods, gadgets and appliances, out of the baggage rule benefits accruing to the rapidly enriching workers.
It will also be seen that the development of these market, leading to the outburst of a whole new range of trade activity, gradually led to the emergence of Bara like markets of the North-west dealing mostly in smuggled goods.
That phenomenon continued gaining widespread boost even in the wake of petering out of the construction and allied economic activity in the oil rich countries and marking the beginning of the end of the employment boom there for countries like Pakistan.
Unfortunately, however, though seemingly taken aback by the gradual drying up of the employment prospects abroad, the governments coming and going out for most part of the depressing 1990s, failed to grasp the gravity of the situation.
For instead of taking timely measures to fulfil the changing requirements of job markets in those countries, they apparently sat back awaiting new opportunities to strike from vague ideas.
Of course, there had been certain half-hearted attempts at catering to this need, but falling short of the actual requirements.
As such, while job opportunities for technically qualified persons, of various descriptions, continued to be very much there, lack of proper arrangements to cater to these simply compounded the growing unemployment problems resulting from the overall economic depression.
The efforts now being made in that direction need to be vigorously pursued from an objectively planned approach which alone can help boost manpower export on the desired scale.