ISLAMABAD, Dec 18: The National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) chairman, Danyal Aziz, on Thursday blamed some ministries, bureaucracy and profiteers for price hike. He rejected the allegations against the local governments for price hike as baseless.

Talking to reporters at a press conference at his office, he said vested interests in connivance with the bureaucracy created artificial price hike to discredit the devolution plan. Citing the examples of increase in oil prices, foreign exchange rates and inflation, the NRB chief said, “how can the district governments be responsible for price hike in wake of macro level decisions”.

Elaborating his point Mr Aziz referred to news reports that the World Bank had cautioned the government to control the increase in prices of oil. “The WB observes that due to increase in the price of petroleum products, overall prices have gone up in the country,” he maintained. “The State Bank has added to inflation due to additional money supply. This is another cause of sudden jump in overall prices,” he added.

Responding to a question, he said prices of consumer items always went up during Ramazan due to increase in demand.

The devolution plan, he said, had a complete and comprehensive system of price control which had been implemented since the introduction of the system.

“Those who have been opposing the system since the very first day want to fail it by devolving the responsibility of different flaws on it and the NRB,” he added.

The NRB chairman said President Musharraf had been apprised that bureaucracy and provincial governments were creating hurdles in implementation of the devolution system.

Mr Aziz said the ministry of industries and production was equally responsible for overall price-hike by not taking any action against those multinational companies that arbitrarily fixed the prices of their products by violating laws.