Bilal Ahmed 
The National Austerity Committee (NAC) held a meeting in supervision of Prime Minister Shahbaz Shareef, meeting discussed the solutions to deal with financial crises country is facing currently. The different measures include 10% cut in government employee’s salaries and 15% reduction from ministries expenditure.
The NAC meeting also considered the measure of reducing the number of federal cabinets and utilizing all these funds for projects on provincial level. The meeting also suggested the reduction of federal ministers, ministers of state and advisors from 78 to 30, all the remaining should work on pro bono basis.
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IMF funds conditions
The government is seeking to get more funds from International Monetary Fund (IMF) but due to difficult conditions, it wasn’t successful from last two months. Now the recommendations from Austerity authority will make ease in getting funds from IMF.
The NAC also suggested that there would be no more utilization of funds for provincial projects and public sector investors would not be able to take loans on government guarantees. One of the member of NAC recommended that there are several ministers working in one sector only, like defense, foreign, finance and security. We should reduce this number to five to six only and other extra ministers should be vanished to control expenses.
While NAC is still managing to deal with loss of big public sector enterprises, Pakistan International Airline (PIA) loss goes up to Rs 67 billion, whereas PASSCO, Pakistan steel mills also faced massive losses this year. The NAC also considered to reduce the funds of defense ministry but defense secretary replied that it would not be possible in this situation of increasing inflation.
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Another officer from finance ministry commented that NAC is working hard to manage expenditure but it would be difficult for government to implement all these measures on real basis.
The debating is still easy but when it comes to implementation, government is hardly taking any major step to save economy in this increasing political disruption.
