Pakistan’s middle classes are trapped in a specific type of loop. They have too much education to accept what is happening without understanding it and too little power to change it. They file their taxes. They send their children to private schools because the public ones have been abandoned. They pay for their own water filtration because the municipal supply is unsafe. They pay for their own security because the state’s protection is unreliable. And now they pay Rs.321 per liter to move through the city they were promised was theirs.
Prices of electricity increased more than twice (2022-2025) due to subsidies being lifted to comply with IMF requirements. Whenever the IMF seals it with the seal, the middle classes have to pay. Not the elite, who have already insulated themselves with solar panels and imported generators. Not the very poor, who receive targeted protection. The middle—always the middle—absorbs the policy.
There is a silence in Pakistani homes right now. Not the comfortable kind. The kind that happens when a father stares at a fuel pump receipt and doesn’t say anything. When a mother quietly moves money out of the savings she doesn’t have. When a young, desperate engineer in Lahore fills the tank of his motorcycle and does the calculations in his head.
The government declared an unprecedented emergency rise of Rs.55 per liter in the prices of petrol and diesel, the new prices coming into force at midnight. And now petrol stood at Rs.321.17 per liter. One of the highest fuel prices in Pakistan’s history.
You would like to know what all that means in the real world? The population of motorcycles registered in Pakistan is more than 25 million. Millions of daily commuters and delivery workers do not own cars but rather use a motorcycle as a need, not a want. Now filling a 10-litre tank costs more than Rs.3,200 at a price of 321.17 per litre. Compared to Rs.2,662 before the hike. That is an extra Rs.538 per tank, a meaningful amount for a daily-wage worker earning Rs.1,000–1,500 per day.
And of the middle class in particular? Millions of Pakistani households use petrol or diesel generators as an effort to endure load-shedding. Even a home that uses a 2 kVA petrol generator to operate 4 hours daily now has to pay between Rs.14,500 and Rs.19,300 each month to run the generator alone at the current rate, compared to the previous rate, where the cost was between 3,000 and 5,000. That’s just the generator. That doesn’t include the actual electricity bill.
The electricity bill that, according to the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, has tripled in a decade, rising from an average of Rs.12.5 per unit in 2015 to Rs.34.45 per unit by 2025, with the increase driven mostly by debt, surcharges, and inefficiency passed on to the consumer. Middle-income households, your salaried professional, your schoolteacher, and your small shop owner, consuming around 250 to 300 units per month, now face effective tariffs of Rs.34.2 per kilowatt-hour.
And nearly 37 percent of that figure is not the cost of electricity itself. It’s circular debt charges, the systemic rot of a failing power sector dumped quietly onto your monthly statement. A power bill that was costing Rs.10,000 in Lahore increased to Rs.22,000 within the short period of only two months in 2024. That is not inflation. That is amputation.
This week, the government has made a decision that the government is terming as progressive. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif sanctioned an increment of Rs.200 per liter in the levy on high-octane petroleum products to a total of 305.37 per liter. The move is expected to generate Rs.9 billion in monthly savings for the government.
The framing was careful. Surgical. The government called it a move to “shift the burden toward the wealthiest segment of society,” with savings earmarked to provide direct relief to the general public. It sounds fair. And on paper, maybe it is. Taxing luxury fuel for luxury cars—who could argue with that?
Here is what nobody is asking: where has every previous round of “relief” actually gone? The government has been collecting a petroleum levy on ordinary petrol too. As of March 15, petrol has a levy of Rs. 105.37 per liter. This is a part of the total price we pay when we buy petrol. When we fill up our motorcycle, our car, or our rickshaw with petrol, we are giving the state a lot of money. Almost one-third of every liter of petrol we buy goes to the state. Petrol is really expensive. The state gets a big share of the money we pay for petrol. And the roads are still broken. The hospitals are still empty of medicines. The classrooms are still overcrowded.
The Rs.9 billion monthly savings from the high-octane levy are being celebrated. But that same government, just days earlier, absorbed a Rs.45 billion subsidy in a single week to freeze petrol and diesel prices and avoid an even larger hike. Forty-five billion in seven days. Nine billion a month from wealthy car owners. The arithmetic of this country is designed to make you feel grateful for crumbs. That is the real cost of “sabar karo, beta.” It is not cruelty. It is something more sophisticated. It is the institutionalization of surrender.
The high-octane levy makes for a good headline. “The wealthy will pay.” Fine. Make them pay. But ask yourself: when is it the turn of the system itself to pay? When does the Rs.2.6 trillion circular debt, built over decades of mismanagement and IPP contracts that nobody scrutinized, stop being the citizen’s problem? When does the electricity stolen through transmission losses, sixteen to seventeen percent nationally, sixty percent in some regions, stop appearing as a surcharge on your bill?
The motorcycle rider in Lahore did not cause the Middle East war. The schoolteacher in Multan did not design the circular debt. The young developer in Karachi did not sign the IMF conditions. But all of them are paying for everything, every month, with no end in sight, and no one at the top of the system who has missed a single meal because of it.
This is not an accident of policy. It is the cumulative result of a state that has consistently protected those closest to power and redistributed the cost of that protection downward until it settled on the shoulders of people who are already kneeling.
If you want to submit your articles and/or research papers, please visit the Submissions page.
To stay updated with the latest jobs, CSS news, internships, scholarships, and current affairs articles, join our Community Forum!
The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Arslan Mirza is pursuing rhetoric at Harvard University to master the art of persuasion. As an independent researcher with over 10 years of experience, he has published more than 1,200 articles and over one million words in numerous US-based publications. You can reach him at [email protected].
