The flip side

Unrelenting IMF conditions will slap new taxes and levies, withdrawing subsidies on lifeline utilities for the poor

Pakistan’s economic woes are a writing on the wall. The government’s ongoing negotiations with IMF to reschedule the 9^th review of its Extended Fund Facility for a mere billion dollars is forcing the country to walk the death trap. Unrelenting conditions from the Fund to slap new taxes and levies, and withdraw subsidies on many of the lifeline utilities for the poor, has pushed it at the brink. Thus, the proposition from the Human Rights Watch to work for economic buoyancy of the common man, and divert synergies for providing relief to the society by enhancing social protection and mitigating vulnerability is worth appreciating. This is what is needed instantly from the government and the lenders as the downslide, owing to economic crunch, is hampering social cohesion.

Reports that the government is contemplating to bring a mini-budget and has agreed to the IMF conditionalities of imposing around Rs800 billion in taxes is unnerving. There isn’t much space to opt for such draconian measures and that too at the pretext of passing on the load to the common man in the form of rise in tariffs and levies in the energy sector, when inflation is all time high hovering at 45%. This sordid tale has lived with us for long — even when we were in the IMF programme. The question is: has it made any difference on the lives of the common man, or led to proactive development? The simple reply is ‘No.’ Thus, what is needed is a new paradigm as the current prism of looking at the economy is myopic.

The HRW has made a pertinent point. Society as a whole is in need of special attention to mitigate the disaster inflicted on it in the form of debt-burden and a non-development premised elite-catering budget. Poverty in Pakistan has risen rapidly in the last two decades, and with a bulging youth population, sentiments of dissent cannot be kept under the lid for long. Time for advancing economic rights in all sincerity. The Fund should stop behaving as Sherlock Holmes.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2023.

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