A report of the Finance Ministry presents a bleak economic scenario with little chances of any meaningful improvement in the foreseeable future. It shows total public debt has gone up from Rs23.02 trillion in 2017-18 to Rs54.39 trillion till March 2023, and external debt and liabilities went up from $95 billion in 2017-18 to $126.1 billion till end of March 2023. The Fiscal Risk Statement (FRS) for 2023-24 identified 10 key sources of fiscal risks, including macroeconomic instability, rising debt, loss-making state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and others that might lead to potential threats and uncertainty.
Though dismal in nature, the report has an encouraging aspect – the policy and decision-makers are fully alive to the alarming situation and this realization might form the basis for an action plan to put the economy back on track. The Cabinet Committee on Economic Revival would, hopefully, address the issues and challenges pinpointed in the report with priority attention to the menace of growing external debt, the repayment of which leaves nothing worthwhile to meet other needs. There is genuine concern among patriotic people that the debt burden has become unsustainable but why these loans could not contribute to enhancing the pay-back capacity of the country. While carrying out a minute study to explore factors and reasons behind this phenomenon, in future no foreign loan should be contracted without prior approval of parliament. This is important in the backdrop of a sorry state of affairs when extremely harsh conditions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were accepted by the successive governments including elected ones without taking parliament on board. It is also a million dollar question as to why the economic conditions of the country, instead of improving, are deteriorating further despite withdrawal of all subsidies, passing on full impact of oil prices in the international market to the domestic consumers, frequent upward revisions in electricity and gas rates making them one of the highest in the world and addition of a myriad of taxes on the common man.
