By Uzma Ehtasham
There is a woman standing at a market stall somewhere in Lahore or Karachi or Peshawar, counting coins. She is not a headline. She is not a data point. She is not the subject of a cabinet meeting or the inspiration for a press release. She is just a mother, recalculating the week’s meals for the third time because the prices have changed since yesterday. And she knows, with the unerring precision that only necessity can teach, what a kilo of ghee ought to cost. She knows when the bread has shrunk while the price has grown. She knows that inflation is not a line on a graph. It is the quiet math of cutting one egg from the children’s breakfast. It is the pause before saying yes to a second cup of tea. It is the slow, grinding erosion of a household’s small dignities.
The latest figures have arrived, as figures always do, neatly typed and clipped into folders for the men in air-conditioned rooms. First-class cooking oil and ghee have become heavier on the pocket by thirteen to sixteen rupees per kilogram. Bakers, without waiting for any official instruction, have raised prices on bread, rusks and fruit cakes. A large loaf now costs sixteen rupees more. A small loaf costs ten rupees more. A packet of rusks has climbed by twenty rupees, and so has a fruit cake. Even cigarettes have crept upward, though that is a cruelty of a different order. This wave follows a pattern so familiar it has become a kind of grim national poetry: petrol and diesel rise, public transport fares lurch higher, and then everything else follows like a reluctant shadow, obedient to the logic of a system that has forgotten whose shoulders carry its weight.
Timing, as ever, is cruel. Families are already buckling under electricity bills that arrive like threats, gas bills that shrink winter warmth into a memory, water bills for a resource that should not feel like a luxury. To add to this weight is not governance. It is punishment. Middle and low-income households, especially those on fixed salaries, find themselves trapped in a cage with invisible bars. They cannot earn more simply because bread costs more. They cannot commute less simply because fares have doubled. A salaried home does not bend easily. It cracks. The government speaks of relief, of inflation tamed, of green shoots pushing through the soil of recovery. But the market tells another story. And the only statistics that matter to that mother are the ones written on the chalkboard at the corner shop. Those numbers are not falling.
To deliver fresh price shocks just before the annual budget is an odd way to run a welfare state. The very idea of a welfare state rests on a simple promise, one that ought to be written in plain language and posted on every government door: that the state will shield the vulnerable, keep essentials within reach, and act as a buffer between global shocks and local kitchens. When instead prices rise every few days, when profiteering goes unchecked, when the only certainty a family has is that next month will be harder than this one, then public welfare has become a phrase without a pulse. One cannot help but conclude that it is no longer a priority. Not a real one. Not one that keeps anyone awake at night.
What is needed now is not another committee. Committees are where good intentions go to die slowly, buried under the weight of agendas and minutes and polite disagreements. What is needed is action that people can see and feel in their hands, in their pockets, in the weight of the bag they carry home from the market. Monitor the price of tomatoes with the same urgency as a stock index. Go after hoarders publicly, not quietly, so that others learn the cost of greed. Provide immediate relief on electricity and gas tariffs, even if temporary, even if imperfect, because a mother feeding her children does not need perfection. She needs one less worry before sunset. Make existing subsidies reach the poor instead of disappearing into administrative cracks. Ensure that market prices are displayed, enforced, honest. These are not revolutionary demands. They are the basic duties of a government that remembers what it is for.
And above all, stop speaking of a welfare state as if it is a destination we will reach someday, after the next reform, after the next loan, after the next election. A welfare state is not built by budgets alone, though budgets matter. It is built by the small, daily decision not to make life harder for those who are already carrying too much. It is built when a regulator picks up the phone and actually calls a hoarder. It is built when a minister visits a market not for a photo but to listen.
Words have their place. They can inspire, console, explain. But when a mother cannot afford a loaf of bread, words become noise. When a father cannot pay the electricity bill, statistics become insult. The government still has time to choose. Not infinite time, but some time. It can choose more rhetoric, another round of assurances, the familiar comfort of promising tomorrow what should have been delivered yesterday. Or it can choose real relief, tangible and immediate, the kind that does not require a degree in economics to understand. The people are watching. They are not watching with hope, exactly. Hope has been worn thin by too many broken promises. They are watching with something more fragile and more honest: with the quiet attention of those who have no other choice but to wait and see. And they are tired of waiting. They have been tired for a long time. The question is whether anyone in power is finally ready to notice.
(The writer is a public health professional, journalist, and possesses expertise in health communication, having keen interest in national and international affairs, can be reached at uzma@metro-morning.com)
