Recalling eras of fair prices

Change in weather or in food price pattern does have an impact, soft or hard, on mind of citizens, especially consumers.

Pleasant mood turns pensive. One need not to explain, the fact speaks itself. It's common observation that wagon and taxi fare from one point to another goes up abruptly following rise in petrol price and short CNG supply. The result is that most of common citizens have to reach their workplaces on foot in scorching heat: same is the position of others who work in a sweatshop.

City olds remind each other the intolerably high fare after the citizens, including the salaried class, were deprived of the government transport service. Such a facility had been launched for masses in large cities under a directive of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

School and college boys also benefited from the GTS until the middle of the 1990. The withdrawal of pro-people service was a bad decision which annoyed elder citizens. Abdul Ghafoor of Satellite Town says he was in his early teens at the time Pakistan came into being, and he often accompanied his father to Rawalpindi bazaars, to buy kitchen items at per seer (now kilo) rate: beef half a rupee; mutton Rs1.25; milk 40 to 50 paisa; wheat flour Rs4 to 5 per maund (40 seers); bread one anna (six paisa); vegetables six to 12 paisa; desi ghee Rs2.50 to 3; egg one anna; and rice half a rupee.

Likewise, prices of fruit like mango, banana and guava were so cheap that even the lower class of people could easily afford. Khuda Bakhsh of the same age recalls the city administration remained attentive to fair quality and easily affordable price level of fruit and wheat 'roti' and meat.

Violators of market rules and regulations were fined on the spot and similarly were punished hoarders and black marketers. That's all true. But the spirit of service to common man dissipated in the same way as was forgotten the old motto: faith, unity and discipline.

"Resultantly, self-interest replaced the national interest, and that is why we today seem falling from heaven to hell," says old uncle Gulzar of Rawal Town of Islamabad. Retired civil servant Khan Sahib, who opted for Pakistan while he was in New Delhi in 1947, relives the horror of migration to Karachi and Lahore and finally to Rawalpindi before giving a very realistic account of ordinary life.

He remembers how prices of food, energy and fuel, including wood and coal used for cooking meals in kitchen, moved up and down. Like him there are many who have at their fingertips information about food prices right from 1953 to date. On the basis of that information, any person can assert meat prices now are 500 times higher the levels five decades ago.

The fact of the matter is that consumers had to protest loudly on roads when sugar price in retail shot up 25 to 50 paisa per kilo. There are instances of administration, civil or military, coming to the rescue of the common people when egg and vegetable prices were raised by hoarders and profiteers. -- zasarwar@hotmail.com