Crunched in the middle.

Byline: Afshan Subohi

The distressed people of Pakistan will need to act smartly, learn to live with less, find constructive channels to vent their frustrations and revive family/community bonds to save and sustain their households. The PTI's budget announced on June 12 did little to provide financial relief or instil hope in ordinary families.

Many Pakistanis find the stress to provide for their families so compelling that the rationality of the lockdown is lost on them. They are desperate to work. If it demands exposure, so be it. Probably they can't afford to lose the living income as they have nowhere to turn to. They do not qualify for the government cash grant.

The proposed national budget has not made the task of family budget makers any less daunting. Like the government trapped between dwindling resources and rising demands, the person controlling the family wallet will have to make tradeoffs. Unlike the government, however, it could be a tormenting exercise for them. It could mean moving children's school or shifting home to counting rotis per meal or turning to the soothsayer for ailments.

The capacity of households to meet their basic needs is an important measure of economic stability. The impact of the national budget on the family income offers a broader measure of budget assessment. In Pakistan, roughly 70 per cent of households fall between the two extremes on the social scale - the rich (6pc) and the poor (24pc).

Vanishing jobs, pay cuts and retrenchments have squeezed the nominal family income of the salaried class/self-employed technicians. Double-digit inflation has eroded the value of money. Falling property prices have deprived small homeowners of the comfort that they cherished. The dynamics of rural families is different, but the locust attack must have instilled fear in the farming families already at the mercy of nature.

If at all, the current budget will alienate people further when horrid stories of death and suffering caused by the rising count of coronavirus patients already haunt them. Will the compounding hardships shake their trust in the system and democracy? My guess is as good as yours.

It is, however, certain that the measures announced by Minister for Industries Hammad Azhar couldn't have inspired confidence in the PTI government and its ability to shield ordinary people from the vagaries of the pandemic, financial crunch and looming food security challenges.

With the International Monetary Fund (IMF)...