Poor performance

According to a survey report, people are disappointed with the performance of the caretaker government, whom they view as a continuation of the PML-Q government and hence responsible for food price hikes energy shortages and a worsening law and order situation.
What has exacerbated the public disenchantment with the caretakers is their virtual invisibility while the country has been moving from one crisis to another. As general gloom pervades the political scene in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's assassination and the law and order situation is a lot less than satisfactory, daily existence is becoming more and more difficult for ordinary people.
As per the State Bank's first quarterly report issued last Saturday, due to continued rising prices of key food staples, the components of consumer price index hit a 30-month high of 14.7 percent in October 2007. The impact of continuing strong surge in the prices of food and energy, it adds, is now increasingly evident in the core inflation as well. In other words, it is becoming impossible for the common man to make ends meet.
Admittedly, the caretakers are not responsible for the past policies that are to blame for the energy shortages and the wheat crisis, nor is it supposed to formulate new policies to rectify these problems for the longer term. Its main responsibility is efficient management of the state affairs on a day-to-day basis.
Unfortunately, it has failed to deliver on that count. Wheat flour, a staple of Pakistani diet, either is unavailable, or available at double the earlier price. The situation is particularly bad in the NWFP and Sindh where people have been standing in long queues to buy flour from utility stores and fair price shops at controlled rates.
It has prompted the ANP leader Asfandyar Wali to issue a warning to the caretaker government in Punjab to either lift the restriction on the inter-provincial movement of wheat or he would go to the Punjab border himself to have the restriction removed. It is a measure of the government's inefficiency that things have come to such a pass.
All the more so in view of a Radio Pakistan report, also carried by the official news agency on Sunday, which quoted Food Department officials to attribute the flour crisis to an "artificial shortage".
These officials went on to claim that sufficient stocks of wheat are available with the Food Department, and that disruptions in the communications system after the December 27 tragedy as well as power shortages, which brought grinding activity to a halt, had interrupted the flow of flour supply to the market.
If it were so, the commodity should have been easily available in Punjab and Sindh - the two main wheat growing provinces. That, of course, is not the case. A more plausible explanation of the shortage is smuggling and hoarding. Whatever the reason, the wheat shortages and food inflation are inexcusable in a country where around 30 percent people live under subsistence level. The caretakers would do themselves and the public much good if they took urgent measures to bring the essential food items within the reach of ordinary people.