The newly elected prime minister has constituted a special committee, which would give recommendations to minimize the volume of the government as well as reduction of government expenditures through reforms in the public sector.
It is a very positive sign that the government has realized the fact that it has a heavy burden of extraordinary expenses, which should be decreased. But to achieve this difficult goal the review of all the government departments is very necessary, but if we look back at the history of the country, it will be revealed that each government, after assuming the power. made such types of announcements in the past but these committees did nothing. Rather they became the burden of national exchequer as the implementation of their recommendations did not move forward even an inch in the past.
In 2020, The former PTI government had also announced to make a high powered commission for investigating the reasons behind the swelling up the foreign debts up to Rs 24000 billion during the tenures of past governments. Whereas a special task force was also formed to promote austerity in the government affairs, which also gave recommendations for merger of several government departments and ministries, but as usual the government threw the report of the task force into the dust bin.
If the government, instead of making committees, should give attention towards controlling the wastage of the national exchequer, then it will come to know what are the big holes in the pipeline and what should be done to cover them up.
The biggest expenditure from the national exchequer is the repayment of foreign debts and their interests. Even the condition has deteriorated so much that now the country will have to take more loans to repay the old overdue debts. This whirlpool in the government is tangled and her attention is diverted from the other national affairs. In other words, after reimbursing the barrowings taken from international donor agencies, the government has not left an ample amount of money for incurring on education, health, people’s welfare and development projects.
The second big load on the national exchequer are the autonomous corporations on which the country is spending billions of rupees every year but these yielded no results at all. Pat experience has shown that these corporations have become dead horses and there is not any further benefit to inject public money into them. Now it is up to the government to go for privatization of those corporations which are running in loss.
The government, which handles the cycle of repaying debts can be termed as successful but the foreign debts is a quagmire in which the country is bogged in with the passage of time from avoiding is not possible until and unless the government has enough funds to refund these loans.
The only way out from this state of affairs is to negotiate with international donor agencies, friendly countries and other financial institutions for rescheduling the foreign loans