The government clearly understands all that needs to be done to put the economy on track. That is why the finance minister has unveiled short-, medium- and long-term plans for 14 key sectors “to ensure sustainable development.” But it is going to take a lot more than to just wish all our troubles away. Because it isn’t exactly clear how, by floating these plans, the government is going to raise the country’s growth rate from three to six percent in the next three years “without creating pressure on the Balance of Payments (BoP) and by keeping inflationary expectations subdued”. Hasn’t the government been trying to do precisely that since it took over? And wasn’t Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin’s check-and-balance system, which is expected to revolve around every minister standing before the prime minister on a monthly basis to report progress, already part of the working mechanism of the federal government? If it was not, is incorporating this process now enough to guarantee results? How will the finance minister himself, for example, explain that GDP growth is problematic for the immediate term because our revenue base is very narrow and all efforts to stimulate exports to increase revenue end up pushing up imports even more and therefore the BoP is chronically in crisis? Besides, such plans risk alienating the common man even further because the talk of improving indicators while prices are rising and earning power is dropping on the ground, which has made life miserable for most Pakistanis, makes very little sense to them. That is why the government should not be surprised if not too many people wish to celebrate its latest smart idea of short- and long-term plans to take care of their suffering. The plan says all the right things but also gives the impression that the indicators that matter to most working-class people, like inflation and employment, have been showing distressing trends for the last three or so years because of somebody else’s fault, not the government’s. And now these problems will go away because ministers will personally be answerable to the PM. Once again, this begs the question of why such arrangements were already not in place. Who have the ministers been answering to all this time? And are prices high and jobs scarce because there was no accountability or because the policies were not quite right?The government has a lot more explaining to do and simply getting the finance minister to wax eloquent of what he would like to do to make thing better will not cut it with the many millions of people who are barely able to make ends meet for no fault of their own. Even the prime minister has repeatedly said that all important indicators are better and the economy is on the mend. But then why are prices of most important things, especially staple food, unaffordable for most people? Why have incomes not risen in proportion to prices? And why is the rupee taking a battering? It is far more important to answer these questions than claiming that all will be well because the administration has had yet another smart idea about the way forward. *