Our two paisas’ worth
The paisa is to go the way of the cowrie: a concept used colloquially but not actually in the markets. Truth be told, the scrapping of decimal coins is not going to affect any one much. The reader would not be able to recall the last time they forked out a fifty paisa coin, what to speak of the two paisa one.
The national assembly finance committee’s approval of the Pakistan Coinage Amendment Act, 2011 is going to ensure that the humble rupee is now to be the lowest currency denomination in the country. It was all but obvious that the coinage law was way past dated. The scrapping, in a way, represents the challenges of inflation to the national mint. With denominations not keeping up with prices, many values are to change. The behavioural framework under which Homo Economicus thinks ups and moves several notches slowly and gradually. Prices that would have been scoffed at for being too high a decade ago are now choice deals. This is not only a function of inflation but also of growth. As any economist worth his or her salt would know, there can be no economic growth without inflation.
If the state is indeed to have a robust and responsive methodology of shifting its own denominational value framework, then it shouldn’t stop at the mint alone. There is also the issue of compensation in the civil services and military. Though, of late, there has been some attempt to ensure that these salaries keep up with the times, much more needs to be done. The state needs also to ensure reasonable compensation for the essential services like doctors and paramedics.
Moving on upwards, the state has also not caught up with the changing economic demography of the country. The laws of the FATA Secretariat, for instance, had made some assumptions about the area, about the education of its citizens and its economic geography. The quaint laws are still being applied despite huge changes. The same could be said about laws and regulations elsewhere.
It is only when we have a state which keeps up with the realities of the time – economic or otherwise – that we can have one that avoids gaffes like having horse allowances for land revenue officials in the twenty-first century.
