Prime Minister Imran Khan identified three tasks for the Economic Advisory Council while chairing it, though these are all tasks which have been created by the commissions or omissions of his own government. The instruction to the EAC to recommend measures to bring down inflation does not account for the fact that apart from such self-generated crises as the wheat or sugar shortages, the price of inputs has gone out of the reach of the common man and made manufacturing uncompetitive. The instruction to prevent any further rise in electricity tariffs, even though the government no longer can control NEPRA’s decisions in this regard. Bringing this task to the EAC after having agreed a massive rise to the IMF is also merely a good intention expressed too late. The task of making recommendations for renegotiating with the IMF does not seem very realistic, considering that the IMF deal was only made because the country needed it so badly, something which the IMF knew only too well in the entire negotiating process.
The EAC, convened for the first time past the midway mark, seems to have been given tasks that the PTI had claimed it had already planned before coming to power. While the economy is being given priority by Prime Minister Imran Khan, he faces the clamour from other crises of governance, the latest of which came in the shape of the TLP protests. The totally unpredictable covid-19 pandemic remains, and is very relevant to the task set the EAC: bringing the pandemic under control requires the sort of lockdown that Mr Khan believes the economy cannot afford. Mr Khan might find he is putting too much on the EAC’s plate, testing it too much like a magic wand to make the grim economic reality disappear. He should realize that that requires much hard work and attention to detail, which he must put in himself, to ensure that his decisions are helpful to the economy and the common man, and not harmful, as they were in generating the sugar and wheat shortages and price spirals.
