Saida Fazal

This government’s last budget is as unimaginative and divorced from real challenges as its previous four. Presenting the finance bill before the National Assembly Finance Minister Ishaque Dar painted a rosy picture of the economy, quoting international agencies’ favourable ratings to claim Pakistan has achieved macroeconomic stability, and would rank among the top 20 countries in four years time. He also trotted out several statistics to prove the economy had turned around and is en course to progress and prosperity. Rhetoric apart, the positive proposals include credit facilitation for small farmers as well as small and medium enterprises, along with some other incentives. The IT sector also gets the attention it deserves. There is good news for those working for the government. Their ad hoc salaries are to be merged with old salaries to increase running salaries by 10 percent. But considering that the government is no longer the biggest employer it used to be, those working in the private sector would still have to make do with existing incomes and struggle to make ends meet amid ever rising costs of living. The minimum wage goes up from Rs. 14000 t0 15000, which is unrealistic enough. Worse still, there is no mechanism in place to ensure the private sector employers comply with the prescribed standard.

This being an election year, besides some subsidies and grants for low income groups, the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) gets a big boost, a 300 percent increase, with Rs.121 allocation. A sum of Rs. 50,000 each is to be handed out to 2.5 million people to start businesses. The likely beneficiaries are PML-N supporters. Rs 20 billion are to be spent on laptop distribution and other such vote winning schemes. And with elections round the corner, rise in Public Sector Development Programme allocation is so huge, 67 percent, that the minister fumbled to say the assigned figure: one thousand billion rupees. A bulk of it is to go into infrastructure construction schemes—of course roads— and the rest spent on energy projects. As regards the first part, it will generate economic activity though only for the short term. What the focus on road building means in reality can be seen in Lahore. The city has shining new roads but a vast majority of the people using them present a gloomy image of its inhabitants, clad as they are in old, unwashed clothes not because they don’t want to be decently dressed but because they can’t afford it. Sadly, human development remains least of the government priorities.

As usual, the minister made no mention of the unemployment rate, an indicator of the health of any economy. Which shows, jobs are nowhere in the economic policy makers reckoning. Also missing from his speech were any allocations to schemes for offsetting the looming environmental challenge that threatens to disrupt the agriculture sector, the backbone of this economy, and also create acute water shortage in this already water scarce country, with disastrous consequences for future generations.