There is a special kind of cruelty in telling a man he must tighten his belt while his master feasts at the same table. Yet this is precisely the theatre of the absurd now playing out across Pakistan, where the International Monetary Fund's latest austerity programme has served up a banquet of suffering for the impoverished multitude while the country's rapacious elite continue to dine with impunity.
The recent decision by the Punjab government to abolish nearly 150,000 vacant government posts spanning Grades 1 to 16 across all departments is not merely an administrative pruning exercise. It is a moral indictment of a system that has chosen to pulverise the already broken rather than disturb the comfortable.
The numbers, stark as they are, barely capture the human devastation. In the education sector alone, 30,391 posts have already been eliminated, with another 30,000 teaching positions marked for the chopping block in a second phase. Watchmen, clerks, assistants, and naib qasids — the sinew of public service delivery have been cast into the wilderness.
The Punjab Finance Department, with bureaucratic coldness, issued formal notifications declaring these abolitions necessary to ‘reduce the financial burden on the provincial exchequer.’ One wonders where this fiscal zeal was when the same government was doling out political patronage and pork-barrel largesse to institutional constituencies that keep the ruling class in power.
To understand this crucifixion of the poor, one must follow the money trail back to the International Monetary Fund, which has once again demonstrated its remarkable talent for prescribing leeches to anaemic patients while the vampires roam free. Pakistan is currently shackled to its 25th International Monetary Fund programme — a $7 billion Extended Fund Facility approved in September 2024, and the conditionalities attached to this fiscal straitjacket have produced the largest fiscal adjustment in the nation’s history, amounting to a staggering 5.6 per cent of gross domestic product.
Here is where the arithmetic becomes morally obscene: 73 per cent of this adjustment has come from revenue measures, with the burden falling disproportionately on already tax-compliant formal firms, salaried individuals, and the less affluent via petroleum levies and indirect taxation. Meanwhile, consolidated public expenditure at the federal as well as provincial levels has risen by 60 per cent.
Non-interest expenditure has ballooned by 70 per cent, with personnel-related spending shooting up from Rs3.7 trillion to Rs5.9 trillion. Political patronage-driven development spending has surged by 64 per cent. The International Monetary Fund has looked the other way.
The number of street children in Punjab has risen to nearly 30 million, a lost generation being forged in the crucible of elite indifference
The comparison with Greece is instructive. Under that country’s post-2009 austerity programme, public sector employment was cut by 20 per cent, and public sector wages and pensions by 15 to 40 per cent. The burden was shared, however painfully, across the public sector.
In Pakistan, the axe has fallen almost exclusively on the lowest rungs of the ladder, while the upper echelons — the ministers, the bureaucrats, the military establishment — have retained their privileges, perks, and swollen emoluments. This is not austerity; it is class warfare by another name.
Pakistan’s tragedy is not that it is poor, but that it is poor in the midst of extraordinary plunder. A few hundred families have dominated virtually all of Pakistan’s legislatures, maintaining their grip on power through generations. Party and electoral politics are dominated by wealthy families, clans, and networks of regional influentials who co-opt even those from non-elite backgrounds into their culture of extraction.
The World Bank’s own Poverty, Equity, and Resilience Assessment, released in September 2025, paints a devastating picture. Unemployment stands at 18.8 million, with at least 6.7 million youth idle. Real wages have declined by 27 per cent since March 2022. More Pakistanis are food-insecure now than in 2022.
The abolition of 150,000 jobs is not merely an economic misstep; it is a social time bomb. In a country where over 85 per cent of jobs remain informal, where low productivity across sectors has constrained income growth, the elimination of even modestly secure government employment represents a catastrophe. These were not lavishly compensated positions; they were Grade 1 to 16 posts, the kind that allow a family to afford two meals a day, send a child to school, and cling to the very bottom rung of dignity.
The fallout is unmistakable: with despair comes a surge in street crime, gnawing at the fabric of urban life. The year 2025 ended as one of the most disheartening periods for government employees, with teachers and clerks staging protests, facing baton charges and water cannons.
Nearly 5,800 schools and 71 colleges were handed over to the private sector in 2025 alone, with an estimated 700,000 children leaving school following outsourcing. The number of street children in Punjab has risen to nearly 30 million, a lost generation being forged in the crucible of elite indifference.
The International Monetary Fund, for its part, continues to play its well-worn role. The Fund’s so-called ‘Pakistan treatment’ follows a pattern of forbearance and accommodation that bears no resemblance to the stringent conditionality imposed on countries devoid of geopolitical utility. Where Sri Lanka and Ukraine were handed time-bound action plans enshrined in programme conditionality, Pakistan has received little more than a wink and a nod.
The International Monetary Fund, in its quarter-century of involvement with Pakistan, has violated this precept with metronomic regularity. Its prescriptions, their sequencing, the structural reforms it conveniently omitted, and its repeated largesse over multiple programmes have conspired to keep Pakistan trapped in a cycle of dependency and dysfunction. The Fund is no innocent bystander; it is a knowing accomplice in a system of extraction that transfers wealth from the many to the few.
As of now, Pakistan stands at a crossroads. The path laid out by the International Monetary Fund and its domestic collaborators leads to ever-greater inequality, social unrest, and the hollowing out of what remains of the public sector. The alternative, a genuine reform programme that taxes the untaxed, dismantles elite privileges, and invests in human capital, remains possible, though it would require courage that has been conspicuously absent from Islamabad’s corridors of power.
Until that courage is found, the cruel theatre will continue: the elite will feast, the International Monetary Fund will applaud, and the poor will be told, yet again, that their hunger is the price of progress. But history has a way of turning the tables on those who mistake patience for permanence. The 150,000 abolished jobs are not just statistics on a ledger. There are 150,000 families with 150,000 stories of dignity denied. And in those stories lies the seed of a reckoning that no amount of fiscal sophistry can forever postpone.