IT is the duty of the state and the society to protect the consumers, particularly in a period of sustained inflation with its varied abuses. A high rate of inflation with a large number of the very poor or one-third of the people living below the poverty line of a dollar a day, cannot be made to suffer double digit inflation, which in developing countries is usually officially under-stated.

Lower level of inflation can also hurt the poor hard if it tops the accumulated inflation of years or decades with occasional marginal relief.

While inflation in certain conditions can promote employment of a temporary kind, at other times, it could cause unemployment, particularly if the interest rates for investment capital becomes too costly.

Inflation leads to adulteration of goods, particularly of essential items in case of short supply. Many do not hesitate to sell contaminated water at a high price as we have seen tragically in the city where a 1,000 poisoned persons were taken to the hospital and more than 10 children died. Some traders do not adulterate but employ short weights and measures to profit by the shortages.

Hence, inflation at 8.74 per cent has to be checked before it rises higher, due to increasing prices of POL and other imports. It has come down marginally from nine per cent in the ending months of the last financial year, though not enough to provide any sense of relief or hope for better times.

We have an economy in which too many retailers have become wholesalers and even industrialists. The rate of profit they expect and extract from the industry is the same as was from their high turn over from retail sales. Ours is a high profit economy; if that rate of profit cannot be had through the right means, wrong means is permissible. And with no official check on such abuses, everyone is free to do whatever is highly profitable.

If there is excess committed on one side, there is an excess of official apathy on the other side or a spurt of excess of official activity followed by long inactivity and expression of helplessness. Such activities are all the more pronounced before the start of Ramzan and in the early days of Ramzan. The traders and industrialists are well-organized. They are usually members of more than one or two trade organizations. Even the agriculturists have their own bodies, old and new and are able to voice their opinion strongly.

The traders have their chambers of commerce and industry and then their federation. The cotton traders have their Karachi Cotton Association. The textile mill-owners have their All Pakistan Textile Mills Association. The sugar manufacturers have their Pakistan Sugar Mills Association. And the cement makers their All Pakistan Cement Manufacturers Association.

Even the small retailers in the large open markets have their market committees which meet often and fix prices.

Most of the associations defend and act like cartels. They safeguard their members’ interests or high profits zealously. The announcement from the Sindh Governor’s House setting up a Council for Consumer Rights (CCR) makes repeated mention of how these bodies function more like cartels and defeat the efforts of the consumers and the government to bring down prices or improve the quality of the products.

The CCR is to cover the whole of the province finally but initially, it would deal with Karachi. But when there is so much detailed and sustained work to be done it is doubtful whether the governor and the CPLC chief, whose hands are full, will find enough time to devote to the consumer rights council.

The body should have been exclusively for protecting consumer interests, at least in the initial six months to one year. Thereafter separate committees should have been set up for Hyderabad, Sukkur, Larkana etc. The problems have to be analysed and solutions found locally.

Besides, the CCR should be free from its extensive law and order duties including checking heroin trafficking and supervising the registration of FIR.

The council will not only perform the assigned tasks but also any other which may be entrusted to it, says the announcement. Enlarging the scope of the council is not in the interest of its efficacy.

A number of women on the CCR may not be happy to deal with heroin cases, a mandate of the committee, and may not be competent for that task. If they succeed in stabilizing prices and preventing profiteering, they would have done a great job.

Holding down prices and preventing profiteering should be the task of the officials in each area and the non-officials there should be encouraged to form such committees following the elections to the local bodies.

The city governments too should have a hand in price stability. Local bodies should not be only for politicking, supporting the government for political purposes and greet ministers and honour them.

The first task of the council is to enforce and implement the existing Pakistan standards and quality council authority standards in the province through the police and other law-enforcement agencies.

It has also to enforce and implement existing laws relating to counterfeiting and infringement of trade or property marks and copyright in the provinces.

If the council has to succeed, its assignments should be re-defined, made more specific. It should focus initially for a period of six months in the area of price stabilization and quality control. Very broad assignments and too many of them will get the council nowhere.

A good initiative should not go waste like many others earlier, for want of specific and well defined objectives.