LAHORE – Every rupee in Punjab’s Annual Development Programme has a dozen claimants. Roads compete with hospitals, sewerage schemes with schools, and every department arrives at the Planning and Development Board convinced its project cannot wait. In that crowded contest, an allocation of Rs19 billion for a network of neighbourhood markets is not a routine line item. It is a statement about which kind of public spending the province now believes in.
The money, set aside in the 2026-27 ADP for Sahulat Bazaars and the smaller Sahulat-on-the-Go facilities, is meant to give every tehsil in Punjab a regulated market for daily essentials. By September, Rs4.83 billion of it had already been released. What makes the allocation significant is less its size than its nature. Pakistan has spent heavily on food relief for decades, but almost always as consumption: a subsidy that is used up within a month and leaves nothing behind. This allocation buys assets. The stalls, sheds, washrooms and control rooms it pays for will still be standing, and still earning rent, long after the release letters have been filed.
That distinction has a history. The body now spending the money, the Punjab Sahulat Bazaars Authority, began life as the Punjab Model Bazaars Management Company, a vehicle for running a few dozen discount markets. Its conversion into a statutory authority under the Punjab Sahulat Bazaars Authority Act 2025 gave it a legal identity, a governance framework and, crucially, the standing to compete for development funds as an institution rather than as a project. Before that change, the network already ran 36 model bazaars across 25 districts. They received around 50 million customer visits a year and sold goods at 10 to 30 per cent below open-market rates. After it, the authority could plan at provincial scale.
At the centre of that transition sits an unusual public official. Naveed Rafaqat Ahmad, the authority’s Director General, is a chartered accountant trained under the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, a certified business analyst and an SECP-certified director. He writes regularly on fiscal policy and governance in the national press. His career has been built on public-sector reform and financial restructuring rather than on the conventional administrative ladder, and it shows in the way the authority frames its work. The vocabulary is cost recovery, asset utilisation and measurable outcomes, not relief packages and announcements.
The clearest product of that thinking is Sahulat-on-the-Go, the roadside model Ahmad put before Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz in April 2025. Its financial logic is easier to explain on a balance sheet than in a speech. On one side sat government roadside land that generated no return. On the other sat thousands of informal vendors trading on that same land, contributing nothing to the exchequer and costing the state money every time an anti-encroachment drive was mounted to remove them. The proposal joined the two. Vendors would receive a uniform stall with security and sanitation in exchange for a modest rent, and over time the rent would carry the operating costs. The Chief Minister approved a Lahore pilot and endorsed eventual province-wide coverage. The Rs19 billion is, in effect, that endorsement turned into cash.
A rent-based model stands or falls on whether its tenants can pay, and here the early evidence is encouraging. In an evaluation by the Punjab Directorate General of Monitoring and Evaluation, 94 per cent of Sahulat-on-the-Go vendors said they were satisfied with their rent, and 85 per cent described their business as viable. Those two numbers matter more to the programme’s finances than any customer rating. A tenant who finds the rent fair and the trade profitable stays, pays and renews.
The provincial government has since built further cost-sharing into the wider network. Under plans announced in May 2026, vendors at new Sahulat Bazaars will receive electricity, cleaning and security without charge. Officials estimate this will save shopkeepers about Rs530 million a year collectively, a deliberate trade-off in which the state absorbs utilities so that vendors can hold prices down. The same plans target produce at up to 40 per cent below open-market rates and 18 per cent below DC-notified prices. They project savings of more than Rs5.3 billion a year for some 850,000 households, along with around 1,300 new businesses.
None of this exempts the model from scrutiny, and an accountant’s framework invites the hardest questions. The first is price discipline. The same evaluation found only 73 per cent of Sahulat-on-the-Go customers satisfied with affordability, the weakest score in the survey and below the 82 per cent recorded at conventional bazaars. A self-financing market that drifts towards open-market pricing would be financially healthy and socially pointless. Daily price monitoring is not an administrative detail; it is the condition on which the public subsidy implied by free land and free utilities can be justified.
The second question is scale. Forty-one Sahulat-on-the-Go units and 27 Sahulat Bazaars are currently under construction. On completion, 139 of Punjab’s 154 tehsils will be covered, with tenders for the remaining 15 already finalised and full coverage targeted by mid-2027. Rapid build-out tends to strain construction quality, and footfall in small tehsils will be thinner than in Lahore, which tests rent recovery. The authority’s own evaluation also recommends at least two permanent bazaars per tehsil. That implies further capital beyond the present allocation.
The third question is accountability for the money itself. A Rs19 billion programme should publish what each site cost to build, what it collects in rent and what it costs to run. That is the only way to show, rather than assert, that the model pays its own way. If the figures hold up, they will make a stronger case for the next allocation than any ribbon-cutting could.
What Punjab has funded, then, is a wager on a particular idea of relief. Its premise is that the state’s most effective tool against food prices may be a well-managed asset rather than a bigger subsidy. Seasonal bazaars are cheaper to announce and easier to photograph. Permanent, rent-paying markets are harder to build and slower to show results, but they compound. If the authority can keep prices honest while it scales, the province will have changed not only where its poorer households buy their vegetables, but how it thinks about spending money on them.
