The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics has decided to remove tomatoes from the Basket of Goods that it uses to calculate inflation in an attempt to fight inflation.
“Look, we need to bring inflation down, specially since the prime minister has announced that he is concerned about inflation,” said Dr Shoaib Hassan, Principal Statistical Officer at the PBS. “And our economist friends, whose performance we evaluate, have asked us that they will now evaluate our performance.”
“So the best thing to do in the current circumstances is to just remove the ever-rising tomato from both the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Sensitive Price Index (SPI),” he said. “This required a lot of convincing from us and the Statistics Division because Dr Hafeez Sheikh, the PM’s advisor on finance was still insisting that tomatoes go for 17 a kilo in a number of markets.”
“Let us hope this does the trick,” he said. “It it doesn’t, we could just keep taking out items one by one. Onions are next.”
