Flashy price controls

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The Sindh government's decision to establish dedicated police stations across the province to monitor and control price gouging is being played up as illustrating a renewed commitment to controlling essential commodity prices, but is really nothing more than smoke and mirrors. At its core, the initiative can genuinely help address profiteering and cheating by having specialised enforcement officials patrol commercial areas and certain businesses, but the same officials could just as easily be assigned to existing police stations instead of wasting millions of rupees in tax money to set up new police stations.

But the move is within the realm of flashy pre-Ramazan announcements by provincial and federal governments alike, only to produce, at best, mixed results. While recent years have seen a few improvements on paper, such as inspecting warehouses and wholesalers instead of focusing entirely on retailers and small vendors, lax enforcement and relatively low penalties work against any positives at the planning level. Even this year, the emphasis on registering cold storages and monitoring their prices demonstrates a proactive stance aimed at addressing one of the loopholes that unscrupulous actors have historically exploited.

Critics have also noted that governments may use the falling inflation rate to fudge data in their favour, effectively claiming that any favourable - or even mildly unfavourable - price variations are due to their price control measures, rather than the fact that the economic upheaval of the past few years has upended the usefulness of year-on-year inflation data for many commodities. Just because the price of an almost unaffordable staple item has stablised does not benefit millions of Pakistanis whose incomes have stagnated - and often declined - in real terms.

Ultimately, combatting price gouging is not about introducing new police stations or other flashy objects. It is simply a matter of committed enforcement with appropriate penalties being imposed on violators, including harsher penalties for repeat offenders.