Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Pakistan Electricity Consumption Up 21% in Just Two Years

Pakistan is experiencing soaring demand for electricity across all of the sectors of its economy. The new demand is being met by rapidly growing deployment of distributed solar, estimated at 38 GW as of June, 2025. In 2025, 44% of solar deployment was residential, followed by industry (26%), agriculture (21%) and commercial users (9%). The expansion of distributed solar has enhanced electrification across the economy, lifting Pakistan's electrification rate to 21.7% in FY2025 from 17% in FY2023, close to the global average of 22%. This surge to over 200 terawatt-hours of electricity is not reflected in official data, according to a report by Ember Energy titled "The solarization of Pakistan's energy economy". 


The solar energy revolution in Pakistan is led by consumers. Driven by soaring electricity costs, unreliable grid infrastructure, and cheap imported solar panels, millions of households and businesses have installed rooftop solar. This rapid transition to solar has transformed the country's energy landscape.  According to the report, Pakistan’s total electricity demand increased by 33 terawatt-hours (TWh) between fiscal years 2023 and 2025. Distributed solar generation alone grew by 36 TWh during the same period, making it the primary driver of electricity demand growth and offsetting declines elsewhere in the power system.


"Pakistan has a thirst for energy, and solar is providing it," said Dave Jones, Chief Analyst at Ember. "Distributed solar is so fast and cheap to build, that it is actually driving up electricity demand."  The newly added solar capacity has saved more than US$12 billion in oil and gas imports by February, 2026, Ember said, as well as enabling growth in the agriculture, industrial and commercial parts of Pakistan’s economy.

Actual Solar Deployment in Pakistan Far Exceeds Official Stats. Source: Ember

The report shows that net metered solar is a “minority” of Pakistan’s current capacity, with far more behind-the-meter and off-grid capacity than registered net metering solar. Distributed solar has ramped up rapidly. In just two years, 27 GW of distributed solar was installed, the same amount of operating coal, gas and oil plants built in Pakistan ever. Distributed solar is also cheaper — residential solar with a medium battery makes electricity at around PKR 20/KWh, half the PKR 40 price for grid electricity. The government statistics only capture the net-metered part of the solar electricity. 

During the first nine months of 2025-26 fiscal year, Pakistan’s energy sector saw steady improvement, with hydro, renewable and nuclear sources overtaking fossil-fuel-based thermal power in installed generation capacity for the first time, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey for 2025-26. 



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Friday, June 26, 2026

Pakistani-American Professor Publishes Landmark Genomic Research on Pakistanis

Dr. Danish Saleheen, a Pakistani-American professor at Columbia University, and his fellow researchers have published a comprehensive analysis of 173,303 genomes from Pakistan, one of the largest genomic studies ever conducted in South Asia. This landmark work is upending how scientists understand human genetics and drug development. "South Asians have been severely underrepresented in genome studies—comprising just 2% of global genomic databases despite representing 25% of the world's population," study leader Dr. Saleheen explained. The study is sponsored by Novartis, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and the Center for Non-Communicable Diseases, Karachi, Pakistan. Its results could fundamentally transform drug discovery. 


The study, published in the journal Nature, has identified knockouts of nearly 6,500 genes—about one third of all protein-coding genes (exomes)—in 34,000 individuals. Cousin marriages are quite prevalent in Pakistan, with half of all marriages occurring between close relatives. Landmark research, including the Pakistan Genomic Resource, highlights how these genetic traits act as both a medical challenge and a massive opportunity for scientific discovery.  

Study of Knockout Genes in Humans vs Mice

What are "knockout genes"? In Pakistan, the study has identified thousands of individuals with naturally missing or "knocked out" or "deleted" genes. Researchers use mice for studying diseases and "knock out" or delete specific genes to study how the deletions impact health and contribute to disease. The problem is that translation of such findings to humans has been difficult, "because mouse genes often have different functions than their human counterparts," Saleheen says. “What’s unique about our Pakistan study is we can go back to participants and conduct comprehensive medical exams to see what kind of effects the gene deletion may have on the individual,” he adds.

The study reveals that South Asian populations carry genetic ancestry components shared with both European and African populations, suggesting that insights gained from the Pakistan Genome Resource (PGR) have broad applicability across multiple human populations. This genetic overlap means that treatments validated in Pakistani populations are likely to benefit diverse ancestry groups globally.

"What we would prefer to do is identify people who are born without working copies of these genes and see if that has an effect on their health."  These "human knockouts" are rare in genome databases like the UK Biobank and the NIH's All of Us, which predominantly contain genomes of people with European ancestry.  "Consequently, many experimental drugs that seem promising in mice fail in clinical trials," Saleheen says. "That costs billions of dollars in losses every year."

Dr. Saleheen is a physician-scientist working at the intersection of human genetics and drug discovery. He has an MBBS degree from Karachi's Aga Khan University and a Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Genomics from Cambridge University.  He is Professor of Medical Sciences and Director of Global Genomics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, founding Director of the Center for Non-Communicable Diseases (CNCD) in Pakistan, and founding Principal Investigator of the Pakistan Genome Resource (PGR) — one of the world's largest human "knockout" discovery programs (www.cncd.org). He is the author of more than 250 research papers and a 2018 recipient of the Clinical Research Forum's Top 10 Clinical Research Achievement Award, the national prize recognizing the ten most outstanding clinical research accomplishments in the United States that year.

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Thursday, June 18, 2026

Does Pakistan's Real GDP Exceed One Trillion US Dollars?

A 2024 joint study of the International Labor Organization and the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority  (SMEDA) estimated Pakistan's undocumented economy at $457 billion. While other South Asian nations, particularly Bangladesh and India, do include estimated undocumented GDP figures in their official GDP, Pakistan's official GDP figures do not include such estimates. If the Pakistani government decides to include estimates of the informal economy in its official figures, the country's GDP would jump to $1,059  billion in market exchange terms and over $4,000 billion in PPP terms. 

Pakistan's Total GDP, including Undocumented, Estimated at over $1 Trillion


In 2023 when the ILO-SMEDA study was conducted, Pakistan's official GDP was $340 billion (34% less than the undocumented GDP), bringing the total real GDP for 2023 to $797 billion. Pakistan's official GDP figure for 2025-26 is projected to be $452 billion. Assuming that the undocumented GDP has grown at the same rate as the official GDP, the undocumented GDP today works out to $607 billion, bringing the total GDP (documented and undocumented) to over $1 trillion. In terms of purchasing power parity, the total national economy, including the informal economy, is estimated to be over $4 trillion, which translates to over $16,000 per capita. 

Being the largest employer, Pakistan's undocumented sector acts as a critical shock absorber for the labor force and sustains millions of low-income households. But it also restricts the government tax collection which could be invested in education, healthcare and infrastructure development. There is a temptation in Pakistan to force documentation of the entire economy as the Indian government has attempted to do. However, it will create a mass unemployment problem as many small businesses would be forced to close. 

India is an example of what can go wrong in attempting to bring the informal sector into the tax net too quickly. Demonetization and GST taxes together have decimated the informal sector. But the Indian government continues to significantly overestimate its annual economic growth, particularly by misjudging the size and trajectory of the country's informal (undocumented) sector.  Because of these estimation errors, researchers, including India's former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian, estimate that the absolute level of India's real GDP may be overstated by 22% to 31%. This implies the average citizen's actual standard of living is lower than official data suggests. 

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Friday, June 12, 2026

Quantum Computing IPO Makes A British Pakistani Billionaire

Ilyas Khan, the British Pakistan founder of Quantinuum, became a billionaire in the company’s IPO on NASDAQ last week. Khan is a pioneer in the revolutionary field of quantum computing which could speed up computing by orders of magnitude. It will have a huge impact in AI and encryption. Dr. Irfan Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American professor of Physics at University of California at Berkeley, is another top expert in quantum computing. 

Ilyas Khan, British Pakistani Founder of Quantinuum. Source: 2023 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP


Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion in an initial public offering last week, making its founder Illyas Khan a billionaire, according to Forbes. The listing, which is the largest to date for a quantum startup, valued Quantinuum at over $15.6 billion after it sold 28 million shares at $60 each on June 3. Its shares opened at $58 per share on June 9. Khan, who owns around 15% of the company, is now worth $2.2 billion. Quantinuum uses a new type of quantum computer; rather than running on silicon chips, it instead uses ions trapped in place with lasers to execute computations. 

Ilyas Khan is the founder and former CEO of Cambridge Quantum, which merged with Honeywell's quantum division to form Quantinuum, now regarded as a global leader in quantum technologies valued at over $15 billion. He is involved directly in Pakistan's technology sector, where he provides guidance on integrating high-level quantum technologies into Pakistan's growing tech infrastructure.

Dr. Irfan Siddiqui, Professor at UC Berkeley


In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is the basic unit of quantum information—the quantum version of the classical binary bit physically realized with a two-state device. Here's how Dr. Siddiqui explained quantum computing in an interview with Design News:

"For me, any quantum technology, including quantum computing, is something that takes advantage of entanglement. And entanglement is the idea that if you have different pieces of matter and you put them together, they behave as a single unit. So, for example, each of the bits in a classical computer are independent of each other. If you flip one, it doesn't affect the one next to it. In quantum computers all of these bits have correlation with each other so they're all tied together like one big mass. In fact, the number of states that they can occupy is exponentially larger because of these linkages between neighboring elements. Quantum computing is the science of manipulating this entangled set of bits for some particular problem of interest in either fundamental science and computation or to do a simulation of the natural world."

Four of Ten Pakistani-American Founders of Unicorns


Pakistanis' footprint is growing in the western tech ecosystem. Ten Pakistani immigrants are included among founders or co-founders of unicorns in America, according to  a recent study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). A unicorn is a startup with a valuation of at least one billion U.S. dollars. Immigrant entrepreneurs of US unicorns are diverse, hailing from 76 different countries. India, with 96 companies, is the leading country of origin for the immigrant founders of U.S. billion-dollar companies. Immigrants from Israel founded the second-most billion-dollar companies with 60, followed by the United Kingdom (47), China (41), Canada (30), Russia (23), France (21), Germany (18), Ukraine (16), Australia (14), Pakistan (10) and Romania (10). Some companies were founded by entrepreneurs from the same country or immigrants from multiple countries.

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Monday, June 8, 2026

Ten Pakistanis Among Unicorn Founders in America

There are ten Pakistani immigrants included among founders or co-founders of unicorns in America, according to  a recent study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). A unicorn is a startup with a valuation of at least one billion U.S. dollars. Immigrant entrepreneurs of US unicorns are diverse, hailing from 76 different countries. India, with 96 companies, is the leading country of origin for the immigrant founders of U.S. billion-dollar companies. Immigrants from Israel founded the second-most billion-dollar companies with 60, followed by the United Kingdom (47), China (41), Canada (30), Russia (23), France (21), Germany (18), Ukraine (16), Australia (14), Pakistan (10) and Romania (10). Some companies were founded by entrepreneurs from the same country or immigrants from multiple countries.

Four of Ten Pakistani-American Founders Listed Among Unicorns


Why are Indian entrepreneurs leading the pack of unicorn founders/co-founders in America?  The key reason is that “the great Indian brain drain” is accelerating with the country rapidly losing its best and brightest to the West, particularly the United States. Large presence of the Indian immigrant unicorn founders in America is attributed to the fact that most immigrant founders come to the U.S. as students or H1B workers, categories dominated by Indians. Over 80% of the H1B visas go to Indian applicants. India also leads in sending students to study in US universities. 

Unicorns in America. Source: NFAP

Pakistan, too, is suffering brain drain but not on the same scale as India. Most prominent among Pakistan-origin unicorn founders/cofounders are Karachi-born Sualeh Asif, Lala Moosa-born Qasar Younis, Karachi’s NED University alumnus Rehan Jalil and Pakistani-American serial entrepreneur Zia Chishti. 

26 year old Karachi born Sualeh Asif, cofounder of Cursor (Anysphere) recently joined the list of Forbes Billionaires after Cursor reached a $29.3 billion valuation in November 2025, according to Forbes magazine. 

43 year old Qasar Younis, a Lala Moosa born Harvard-educated Pakistani-American, is the CEO of  Applied Intuition, a physical AI and autonomous vehicle software firm valued at $15 billion. Younis's resume includes his role as Chief Operating Officer of Y-Combinator, a spawning ground for tech giants Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe in Silicon Valley, according to Fortune Magazine.

Rehan Jalil, a fellow alumnus of NED University in Karachi, founded AI-powered data privacy and governance platform Security.AI. The startup has now been acquired by Veeam for $1.725 billion.

Zia Chishti is a serial entrepreneur from Pakistan. He founded Afiniti.AI which reached a $1.6 billion valuation back in 2017. founded his first company Align Technology in 1997 in Silicon Valley. It creates clear plastic braces for straightening teeth by using advanced 3-D computer imaging. The technology now trademarked as Invisalign has helped millions of people straighten their teeth for a beautiful smile without enduring the pain and unsightly looks of the traditional steel brackets and wires used in orthodontics. Align Technology is now valued at $10 billion.

The NFAP study found that immigrants have founded or co-founded 59% (455 of 775) of America’s privately held startup companies valued at $1 billion or more. That is an increase from 55% in NFAP reports released in 2018 and 2022. 

Approximately two-thirds (66%) of U.S. billion- dollar companies (unicorns) were founded or cofounded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Nearly 80% of America’s unicorn companies (privately held, billion-dollar companies) have an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role, such as CEO or vice president of engineering. Almost one in four U.S. billion- dollar companies, or 24%, have a founder who came to America as an international student. The research shows the importance of immigrants in cutting-edge companies and the U.S. economy at a time when U.S. immigration policies have grown more restrictive.

The collective value of the 455 immigrant-founded billion-dollar companies is $5.0 trillion, which is more than the total market value of companies listed on stock markets in all but 7 countries, including the UK and Germany, and a demonstration of the wealth-creating power of immigrants. The collective value of immigrant-founded billion-dollar companies rises to over $5.8 trillion if one includes unicorn companies that have gone public since 2016.

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Growing Fan Base of Cockroach Janata Party in India

"Indians live like cockroaches and die like cockroaches", argued Jayant Bhandari in an X post in April this year. "They vote for bottom of the barrel cockroaches as rulers, who rightly treat them as cockroaches", he added, faulting the people of India for this state of affairs. More recently, Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant said during a hearing that certain unemployed youth were "like cockroaches" who enter professions with fake degrees or become social media and RTI activists attacking the system.  Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian graduate of the public relations program at Boston University, picked up on it. He posted on X on May 16: “What if all cockroaches came together?” Dipke created a political party, named it Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a parody of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and established a website that quickly gained tens of millions of followers, according to the New York Times. 

Cockroach Janata Party Logo. Source: CJP Website


Dipke embraced “cockroach” in the party’s name to reinforce the fact that the insect, which arouses visceral disgust in many people, is also nearly indestructible. “What was thrown at them as an insult, now they are carrying it with pride,” he said. 


The group of Indians described by the Indian Chief Justice as "cockroaches" is made up of over 100 million young people aged 15-29 years who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) as estimated by the World Bank. They make up the world's largest NEET population in any country. Such massive numbers threaten the country’s demographic dividend, risking long-term economic stagnation, widening gender disparities, and severe social instability. They represent a massive reservoir of untapped human potential that drains productivity. 

As a result of failed policies and lack of opportunities at home, India is driving its best and brightest to the West, particularly to the United States, at an increasingly rapid pace. A 2023 study of the 1,000 top scorers in the 2010 entrance exams to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) — a network of prestigious institutions of higher learning based in 23 Indian cities — revealed the scale of the problem. Around 36% migrated abroad, and of the top 100 scorers, 62% left the country, according to a report in the science journal Nature.  Nearly two-thirds of those leaving India are highly educated, having received academic or vocational training. This is the highest for any country, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.


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