Debt ridden state entities

The caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar has recently informed the nation that the country was facing financial problems and those state owned enterprises (SOEs) which had been incurring losses, were further adding to these economic woes. The Premier made this note after chairing a high level meeting regarding the worst management and business affairs of the Pakistan International Airline (PIA), which currently needs billions of rupees funds to keep its aeroplanes flying. The Prime Minister stressed upon expediting the privatization process of PIA and other SOEs running into losses, adding that their losses could not be met with the public tax money.

Historically, Pakistan is a developing economy with scanty domestic revenue, a weak industrial base, and growing energy crises coupled with aggravating impacts of the rising inflation which presents a meek picture of the country’s economic outlook. According to the World Bank report, the poverty rate has surged to 39.4 % with almost a 5% increase in the previous year, posing serious challenges to over 240 million masses, pushing 12.5 million below the poverty line. Amid such domestic and global challenges, several state owned entities including the PIA, Pakistan Railway, Pakistan Steel Mills, WAPDA, the Sui Northern and Sui Southern Gas Pipelines companies and dozens of others state owned enterprises have failed to run their routine operations and need billions of rupees on regular intervals to keep their wheel running and pay salaries of their employees in addition to bulk of circular debt which they cause on regular basis.

Realistically, those business giants should have been money generating machines for the country but unfortunately played adversely and turned into white elephants for the nation as well as the government. The nation had poured hundreds of billions of rupees into those institutions in the past years but all those endeavors neither improved their performance nor resolved their persistent economic and operational issues on a sustainable and permanent basis. In fact, no nation could ever afford such cruel waste of hard earned tax money in futile ventures and failed missions. Therefore, privatization of debt ridden entities is the only solution to this recurrent problem. As soon as it could be accomplished, it would be better.