The fiction of price control

"Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible." Few observations better capture the absurdity of Karachi's price-control regime, where official price lists abound, Commissioner Counters have quietly vanished, and enforcement appears to exist chiefly on paper. Karachi today offers a sobering illustration of this warning. Laws exist, notifications are issued, counters are installed, and bans are announced, yet enforcement is applied so selectively and superficially that governance has been reduced to ritual. What remains is not regulation, but the illusion of it.

One of the core statutory responsibilities of the Commissioner Karachi is the daily fixation and enforcement of prices of essential commodities, including meat, milk, poultry, vegetables and fruits. The administrative machinery appears intact. Official price lists are printed and displayed across the city. On paper, compliance seems universal. On the ground, it is almost entirely absent.

Vendors openly violate the notified prices without embarrassment or fear. The consumer, meanwhile, is placed in an impossible position: either submit quietly or invite confrontation, ridicule and hostility. Any reference to reporting the violation is brushed aside casually because experience has taught both buyer and seller the same truth: there will be no consequence.

In an attempt to address this charade, the Commissioner's office once introduced Commissioner Counters in medium-size and large retail outlets. The idea was sensible: a visible state presence offering immediate redress and deterring overcharging. Unfortunately, the fate of these counters revealed the depth of institutional decay.

Today, not a single store in the entire Defence Housing Authority area, from the smallest neighbourhood outlet to the largest retail chain, maintains any meaningful Commissioner Counter or appears to pay the slightest heed to official price-control instructions. The counters that once existed have vanished quietly, without explanation and without consequence.

The Commissioner Counter had long ceased to function in any serious sense before finally disappearing altogether. The confidence with which this occurred was revealing. It reflected not defiance, but certainty - certainty that enforcement had ceased to matter.

Even before their final disappearance, many of these so-called Commissioner Counters had already been reduced to a mockery of the law. A few poorly packed items, usually lentils, rice, or sugar, would be placed obscurely in some neglected corner of a store, without proper branding, supplier details or transparency. Though marginally cheaper, the shabby presentation appeared designed less to assist consumers than to discourage scrutiny.

Predictably, these symbolic arrangements soon vanished altogether. Items were removed, signage taken down, and the very concept of a Commissioner Counter erased. What remained was not compliance, but contempt. If this does not amount to a public mockery of the law, and of the executive authority of the Commissioner Karachi Division, it is difficult to imagine what does.

The same pattern has repeated itself in the enforcement of the plastic bag ban. Major stores were directed to replace plastic bags with paper ones. The transition began with much fanfare, inspections, and visible pressure. Within a fortnight, plastic bags returned as if the ban had never existed. No fines followed. No outlets were sealed. No deterrent was established.

What followed borders on regulatory absurdity. Large stores began selling cloth shopping bags at checkout counters, effectively monetising a ban they themselves violate. Customers are nudged into purchasing these bags, while plastic bags continue to be freely used inside the same stores for meat, vegetables and fruits. The ban, it appears, applies selectively, more to optics than to practice.

This is not environmental policy. It is selective enforcement masquerading as reform.

When such violations occur openly in posh, high-visibility, well-policed areas of Karachi, the implications for the rest of the city are obvious. If the law is not enforced where scrutiny is greatest, it is almost certainly absent elsewhere. The rot is not isolated; it is systemic.

Karachi does not suffer from a lack of laws, notifications or committees. It suffers from the normalisation of non-compliance and the evaporation of fear of enforcement. Vendors no longer worry about inspectors. Retail chains no longer anticipate penalties. Consumers no longer expect protection.

What is required is not another circular or press release, but administrative resolve. Enforcement and reporting staff must be shaken up. Either violations are not being reported, or reports are being ignored, or compromised. None of these possibilities is acceptable.

Commissioner Counters must be restored in all major retail outlets, without exception. The plastic bag ban must be enforced uniformly, not theatrically. Most importantly, enforcement actions must be visible enough to restore public confidence that the law still exists beyond paper.

A city cannot be governed by signage and symbolism alone. Laws must first be enforced before they can be respected. Until then, Commissioner Counters will remain exactly what they have become: a mockery of the law, if not a quiet source of corruption.