New Delhi: Pakistanis are eating and travelling less to deal with sky-high inflation in the country, unable to pay for daily bills, and even their children’s education.
The beleaguered country’s weekly inflation touched 40 per cent last Friday — for the first time in five months — as consumer prices rose significantly due to onions, chicken, eggs, rice, cigarettes and fuel, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics reported.
There is a fear among certain sectors that the economy may never come back on track, and that the situation may continue worsening both on the economic and political fronts.
A recent report in Dawn tries to gauge the misery on the ground, gleaning the experiences of a security guard in Karachi, domestic helps, a student and a small-scale shop-owner.
Imam Ali, 55, who works as a security guard, said: “If our children ask for something, we simply make excuses. If we eat one time, the second meal is hard to manage… we tell the children to just sleep.”
From a small village near Nawabshah, Ali lost his livestock and crops in the 2020 floods, which forced him to come to Karachi to look for work. He earns Pakistani Rupee 15,000 a month.
“We eat meat only on the day of Bakra Eid. The whole year, we can only have meat if someone offers it to us, otherwise, we cannot buy it with our own money,” he was quoted in the report.
The country, which is wrangling for a bailout by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is still going through the aftershocks of the devastating 2022 floods and the stopgap measures taken by the government to deal with inflation. The most jarring among these are additional taxes announced by Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, who increased the GST and effected another hike in natural gas and fuel prices.
“The new prices of petroleum products stand at PKR 272 per litre for petrol, PKR 280 for high-speed diesel, or HSD, PKR 196.68 for light diesel oil (LDO) and PKR 202.73 for kerosene,” the report said.
The surge in fuel prices has stopped Ali from travelling to his village to visit his family – his wife and eight children. They relocated to a temporary shelter near Nawabshah after Ali’s village was again flooded in 2022. “Earlier, we could travel to Karachi (from Nawabshah) for PKR 700 to PKR 800. Now, the bus drivers demand up to PKR 1500,” he said.
Since his income has not changed in the last three years, he cannot afford to send his children to school, which apparently now houses the livestock of the local feudal lord.
With wheat at nearly PKR 100 per kg, and chicken at PKR 400, domestic help Rukhsana Bibi, 41, said she spends PKR 300 to come to work, which was earlier PKR 100.
Like Ali, she compromises on meals too. “We used to eat three times, but now we compromise on one meal,” she was quoted in the report.
She also said wheat flour was barely available, adding, “Our kids stand in line for days to get one sack and that too is expensive.”
She has also pulled out her children from a private school and put them in a public institution, where she now struggles to buy books and stationery.
Another domestic help Dilshad Begum said: “It’s become very difficult to eat… we cook once and eat it thrice… We are eating less, travelling less…Bachhe becharey taras rahe hain khaney peeney ke liye“.
Shop-owner Nadeem Uddin Siddique, 60, says small businesses have been hit the most due to inflation. His weekly investment of PKR 50,000 has increased to PKR 100,000, he said, adding, “We are shrinking ourselves. If we had four cups of tea before, now we have one.”
MBBS student Hania Waseem, 22, now spends PKR 30,000 per month on daily commute, where she would earlier spend PKR 15,000.
Speaking about rising fees in educational institutes, she told Dawn, “When we got admissions, our fees amounted to PKR 950,000. For the new batches, the fees have gone up to PKR 3,500,000.”
She believes if inflation is necessary, it should affect all, not just the poor and the middle classes.
Freelancer Daniyal Sattar said: “I would say what any other Pakistani would say… tax the rich. It makes no sense that a person who makes PKR 2 mn pays the same price for fuel as someone who earns PKR 25,000.”
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