LAHORE – It is rare for a provincial welfare body to attract serious federal attention in this country. The dynamic usually runs the other way. A federal scheme is announced, the provinces lift it, and the scheme then loses the political weight that made it work in Islamabad in the first place. In the case of the Punjab Sahulat Bazaars Authority, the direction of attention has been reversed for some months. The federal Ministry of Planning has signalled, in a sequence of policy memos and public statements, that it is studying PSBA’s operating model with a view to extending one of its formats to Islamabad and possibly to other provinces. To anyone familiar with the long history of federal-provincial replication in Pakistan, this is unusual.
The reason is not, on its own, the size of the body. The Authority operates 49 permanent bazaars, 15 mobile units and a temporary Ramzan footprint of eleven outlets. Its 2023-24 turnover, at about Rs 1.545 billion, would not place it in the top decile of provincial entities by revenue. The reason has to do with the structure of its accounts. The Authority’s annual operating surplus, recorded at Rs 14.6 million, is unusual in a public-sector retailer. The fact that the surplus was achieved while delivering essential commodities at prices on average lower than those of the open market is more unusual still.
Both of these characteristics are recent. The body that the Authority replaced — the Punjab Model Bazaars Management Company, incorporated in 2016 — recorded a Rs 14.31 million deficit at its starting point. The improvement is documented year by year in the public accounts. The shift from deficit to surplus required a sequence of design choices, most of them unspectacular. Centralised procurement reduced the share of margin going to intermediaries. An all-inclusive stall-rent structure suppressed the volatility of vendor operating costs. A solarisation pilot at the Township bazaar in Lahore reduced monthly electricity bills from about Rs 1 million to roughly Rs 100,000. Procurement reforms recorded by the Authority’s internal audit unit are reported to have saved Rs 130 million across recent years.
These design choices are publicly associated with the Authority’s first Director General, Naveed Rafaqat Ahmad, who was retained when the company was upgraded into a statutory body under the Punjab Sahulat Bazaars Authority Act of 2025. Mr Ahmad is a Chartered Accountant of England and Wales. He has run the body since 2016. His public statements about the Authority’s design have been consistent over time: that subsidy-driven welfare programmes are fiscally fragile, and that the cost-suppression alternative — though slower to scale — produces a structure that can survive its founding political cycle.
There is empirical support for the direction of his argument, even if the Ministry of Planning’s eventual policy will have to reach its own conclusions. A March 2026 economic impact assessment by Ipsos, the global research firm, recorded prices for the nineteen Ramzan-relief commodities at PSBA bazaars between 2 and 40 per cent below open-market levels and between 2 and 18 per cent below the rates notified by district commissioners. The same assessment compared a basket of essentials at PSBA bazaars in Punjab to identical baskets sold by retailers in Islamabad, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta. Punjab’s PSBA prices were, on average, 31 per cent below the national reference price as published by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. They were also up to 58 per cent lower than Quetta’s Rs 1,350 per ten kilograms of flour against Punjab’s Rs 850.
For a federal ministry weighing replication, the more relevant calculation is the per-citizen one. The Authority’s annual footfall, after the upgrade, is estimated by Ipsos at 189 million. About 2.38 million households now use the bazaars regularly enough to be counted as beneficiaries. Their average monthly saving, against the open-market basket they would otherwise buy, is Rs 5,170. Multiplied across the beneficiary base, the cumulative annual saving comes to Rs 147.5 billion. Independent academic work has begun to track these outcomes: a 2024 paper in the Review of Education, Administration and Law treated the underlying model as a rare case of state-driven innovation; a 2025 paper in the Pakistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences described it as Pakistan’s only public welfare body to have been elevated from a company to a statutory authority through what the authors called a unique business and operational mode.
There are arguments against replication. One is that Punjab’s administrative capacity, particularly in procurement and price-monitoring, is meaningfully stronger than that of some other provinces. A model that succeeds in Lahore may struggle in a setting with weaker institutional behaviour. A second is that the political incentives in some provinces continue to favour a price-subsidy model rather than a cost-suppression one, because the political dividend of a subsidy is more visible than the slower dividend of a structural cost cut. Mr Ahmad has himself acknowledged the second concern in interviews, while arguing that the statutory carrier is what makes the model durable. Without statutory backing, he has said in effect, an authority of this kind tends to revert to its political environment.
The Ministry of Planning’s interest is, for the moment, narrower than full replication. The mobile-bazaar format — Sahulat on the Go — is the format under discussion for an Islamabad pilot. It is also the most transferable element of the package. It does not require land acquisition. It does not require a long-term capital build. It does require the centralised procurement chain that PSBA already operates. If the Islamabad pilot proceeds, it will be Pakistan’s first instance of a federal-territory welfare format borrowed wholesale from a provincial body.
What the broader federal study eventually concludes is uncertain. The simpler observation is that the conclusion is being studied at all. For a provincial authority that did not exist in its current legal form two years ago, that is a non-trivial achievement. It is also a measure of how rare a workable subsidy-free welfare model has been in Pakistan’s recent administrative history. The Authority’s experience suggests that the model is not impossible. It suggests that it is the design choices, more than the political conditions, that make the difference.
