EDITORIAL: It shouldn't take the prime minister's advisor on finance Dr Hafeez Sheikh to remind provinces that controlling prices is their responsibility, especially when it comes to essential items, 10 years after the National Assembly passed the 18th Constitutional Amendment and green-lighted devolution of substantial powers to them. Yet that is exactly what he had to do at a meeting of the National Price Monitoring Committee (NPMC) the other day, betraying frustration as well as helplessness on the part of the centre as difference between wholesale and retail prices of most commodities widened to as much as 40 percent. It is strange that people have retained the tendency of blaming the federal government for high inflation, especially food inflation, whenever the going gets tough. But it is far stranger that provincial governments also seem to share this habit. The main problem is that even as everybody celebrated the devolution at the time of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) government in 2010, nobody then or since gave much thought to developing the provinces' capacity to fulfill all the new responsibilities. There is also a psychological aspect to this because people just seem unable or unwilling to abandon the old mindset of blaming everything that goes wrong at the centre.
Prices are products of the forces of demand and supply, of course, and they are in turn influenced by the country's monetary policy, which comes out of an autonomous State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) in Karachi not the finance ministry in Islamabad. And whatever impact the Bank's toggling of the interest rate or feeding the rupee to foreign exchange market forces has on prices is the responsibility of the centre and provinces to handle together. Provinces can't expect to have the power to decide about inter-district movement of all commodities, with the intention of influencing prices to either side, and then turn around and blame the government when supplies run short and prices inch upwards. The problems is much amplified when supplies of the most essential commodities, like kitchen items, become problematic because people tend to become traumatised before the economy does. And in times like the present, when 11 opposition parties have joined hands in a bid to bring down the government, economic problems very quickly become political headaches. It's for a reason, after all, that even political analysts have begun fearing that food inflation might push the common man to join the opposition's protests.
Perhaps the federal government is also just a little guilty of muddying the waters here. Because when the prime minister himself promises to use all the state's might to control prices, which he blames on price manipulation by so-called "mafias" and interest groups more than incompetence of provinces, and fails to honour his word every time then it is only natural for people to hold it against him; especially those at the very bottom of the food chain who wouldn't understand the first thing about devolution even if they cared. In fact, the federal government should have taken the position that the provinces get their act together much earlier. Then it should also have offered to provide any and all help it can in terms of developing the capacity that devolution demands of the provinces. As things stand, devolution of power to provinces looks very good on paper and is in line with the true democratic spirit and all that, but it amounts to precious little if the provinces are just not able to develop the required working mechanism to exercise all that power and responsibility.
There is also the fact that literally nothing is achieved by arguing about the matter endlessly. This is one of those legal tangles that will require all administrations, federal and provincial, to want to do the right thing in the interest of the people and the state. Perhaps a good place to start for provincial governments is to muster the political will that solving this particular problem is going to take. Then, if the centre does not provide the help they need, they can complain all they like. First, though, they must fulfill one of their prime responsibilities and help ensure price stability. It's bad enough that nobody has been able to breathe any sort of life into the economy and ordinary people are suffering as a result of it. But for prices to hike uncontrollably just because provincial governments cannot do their basic job is simply unacceptable.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
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