PTI claims 9m pushedinto poverty in Punjab
Shaikh Waqas Akram said that the first phase of the civil disobedience movement is ongoing, and it is aimed at Pakistanis living abroad. PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
PTI Central Information Secretary Sheikh Waqas Akram has alleged that nine million additional people have been pushed into poverty in Punjab, while the government spent Rs11 billion on a luxury aircraft.
He warned that the country's economic freefall would continue until the public mandate is restored.
In a hard-hitting statement, Sheikh Waqas claimed that a glaring and suspicious black hole existed in the government's data timeline.
He noted that the official survey deliberately skipped the critical 20222024 period, jumping from 2019 straight to 2025 and clubbing six years of data together in a calculated attempt to conceal the economic devastation unleashed during the first PDM tenure.
The PTI leader asserted that the omission was deliberate, stressing that the government concealed the 20222023 figures because their transparent release would have shown that under the Imran Khan-led PTI government, the economy remained stable and achieved growth of around 6% despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said that this hard-earned progress was systematically dismantled by the current rulers after toppling the PTI's well-performing government through "a regime change conspiracy".
He strongly slammed the government, accusing it of orchestrating a planned humanitarian disaster through incompetence, ineptness, shortsightedness and self-serving royal behavior, which, he said, had pushed millions of Pakistani families into hunger and despair amid backbreaking inflation and a sharp erosion of public purchasing power.
Sheikh Waqas stated that the economic devastation was reflected in the government's own recently released poverty survey. "The figures released by the Ministry of Planning are not just statistics; they are a charge sheet against the PDM-2 regime," stated Sheikh Waqas.
"In just a few years, this government has reversed a hard-won economic progress during Imran Khan-led PTI government." He pointed out that the national poverty rate had surged from 21.9% in 2018-19 to 28.8% in 2024-25.