The government, it is rumoured, is set to start a massive relief package soon enough. That would be understandable. It is, presumably, an election year and the government, like any sitting government, would want to pull out all the stops to compensate (literally, in some cases) for the incumbency factor.
Politics is politics and such a spending drive would be kosher. But how much would be too much? This is a slippery and tempting slope which the government should be aware of. Because if the government wants to get popular irresponsibly, there is much it could do.
Consider the power crisis. The government can make it all go away. No power outages from a couple of months before the election. It would do this by settling a significant chunk of the circular debt doing the rounds in the power sector and ensuring uninterrupted electricity. Would it work? Yes. Would it be sustainable or even responsible? No. The power crisis emerges from a number of factors, chief of which is the mismatch between the power tariffs and how much it costs to generate a quantum of power. There are also the inefficiencies and transmission losses, which require a huge amount of money to rectify. The correct approach would be to fork out an amount for the latter and raise rates for the former. Not popular steps, these, but they would be the grown up thing to do. In the popular approach, all the money would have been spent and the circular debt would ratchet up again in a matter of months.
If the government does not behave responsibly, a part of the blame could also be placed firmly on the media and the puerile and biased manner in which it covers – amongst other areas – the economy. Instead of conveying to the polity the scope and nature of the problem, it plays to a gallery that doesn’t want any sympathy for the government. So in the natural gas crisis, the public thinks that the only crisis is that of incompetence, not that off genuine shortage. In the RGST debate, the public thinks the government plans to increase the GST rate. The list goes on…
Here is to hoping some sense, not just in the federal government but also the provincial ones, prevails. Let’s not do a Musharraf on the next government.
