In the face of a worsening energy crisis, Pakistan’s leadership has unveiled a familiar menu of austerity measures (a four-day workweek, temporary school closures, rotational work-from-home arrangements, a 50pc cut in fuel allowances for departments, and a reduction in official vehicles on the road). These steps may sound decisive, but they do little to address the everyday distress already spreading through households and markets. Petrol prices have already been raised by about 20 per cent. Further hikes loom large, and the State Bank has already warned that energy volatility has clouded the inflation outlook.
That is why the present drive feels less like reform than ritual. Personal sacrifices by officials are meant to signal seriousness. But symbolism cannot substitute for relief. The crucial question is not whether austerity has been announced, but whether it makes life materially easier for households already facing rising transport costs, expensive essentials and the threat of higher electricity charges. So far, it does not. Pakistan had only recently brought inflation down from the 2023 peak, and an oil shock of this kind risks reopening the same wounds just as the economy had begun to stabilise.
The deeper and oft-ignored problem is structural. Oil remains Pakistan’s biggest import item, worth about $11.3 billion in 2025, and most of it arrives through vulnerable sea lanes linked to the Gulf. Around 90 per cent of Pakistan’s trade moves by sea. Therefore, no one, not even the most Panglossian, Pollyannaish of analysts, can dismiss how a single disruption in the Gulf threatens the import bill, inflation, business confidence and household budgets all at once. Yet the government’s response still avoids the heart of the matter: Pakistan’s oil dependence is overwhelmingly a transport problem. Available estimates suggest transport consumes roughly 55 per cent to 60 per cent of petroleum products, while the country’s freight system remains heavily road-based, and rail carries only a tiny share of goods. Closing schools for two weeks and reducing office attendance may save some fuel at the margin, but they do not change the system that forces Pakistan to burn imported oil so heavily in the first place.
This is why piecemeal responses have repeatedly failed. Temporary controls, ad hoc conservation drives and performative belt-tightening may buy political time, but they do not reduce strategic vulnerability. A credible response would pair emergency savings with structural change: more freight moved to rail, serious investment in electrified public transport, better urban mobility planning, and faster deployment of cleaner domestic energy where possible. Pakistan’s power mix has diversified more than before, with renewables accounting for about 30.8 per cent of electricity generation in 2023. Transport, by contrast, remains the weak flank.
What the country is witnessing, then, is a familiar pattern wherein the public is asked to absorb the pain of an external shock while the state offers mostly temporary restraint in return. Austerity may be necessary during a crisis, but without structural reform, it merely helps to weather the storm. Nothing more. Nothing else. *