Editorial
Rising prices, vulnerable savings
Time to control vested interests
These are crunch times for people in the middle and lower income groups. With their fixed incomes unable to cope with ever rising prices of essential food items, it is now their bare savings which are under threat. As a report in this newspaper makes it obvious, that dark moment when people must cough up their limited, even paltry savings in order to meet daily family expenses is finally here. With inflation going up to 8.80 per cent in the last fiscal year from 7.31 per cent in the one preceding it, one does not require much wisdom to grasp the nature of the predicament fixed income groups are caught in.
It is a situation the authorities unfortunately seem ill equipped to handle. It may have been a gaffe for a minister to suggest that people eat less in order to force traders to reduce prices. But what does cause consternation is that when private investment has gone up lately and there are all the glowing figures pointing to progress in productivity and import at costly foreign exchange, the supply side and asking prices keep fluctuating. Dishonest traders, backed by powerful coteries that no one can take on, are clearly grasping ever deeper into people's pockets. The government is yet to break the monopoly stranglehold on the market of a handful of industrialists and vested interest groups.
This distortion of the market caused by unbridled profit motives of the trading community, unless checked decisively, will wreak havoc on society. Curiously enough, even in this month of Ramadan when the holy spirit of the season is all too frequently invoked, traders are cheerfully fleecing citizens with prices that do not stand the test of reason.
The government should invigorate the role of TCB as a market player by beefing up its import, supply and distribution operations, so that the availability of quality goods in high demand during the Ramadan can take the heat off the marketplace and help level down the prices to some extent.
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