ISLAMABAD, June 20: People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) again questioned the budget figures on Tuesday saying that even the World Bank (WB) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) had backed off from the official poverty estimates trotted out by the finance ministry for this budget.

“Not only do the regime’s figures contradict themselves, it has now been proven by the international institutions that these statistics are manipulated and contain massive procedural and accounting discrepancies,” Ms Rehman said in a statement issued here on Tuesday.

Despite the regime’s tall claims of reducing poverty to 23 per cent suddenly, both the WB and the UNDP had challenged this claim, which seemed little more than an election slogan, she observed.

Not only have the two global institutions given much higher estimates of poverty in Pakistan, they have also raised crucial questions about how poverty is now measured by the regime, arguing that 2001 could not be used as a base year for comparison or estimation, as it was a drought year, she added.

“No one faced with the realities of life outside ministries can understand how the standards of living could have improved in Pakistan, when there has been a consistent increase in petroleum prices of 250 per cent in the last six years,” the PPP MNA said.

But, the saddest part of the story, she added, was that despite the increasing number of suicides from poverty and unemployment in the country, the regime provided no relief to the common man and hid behind the fudged figures.

“No one can explain what happens to the 40 per cent petroleum surcharge that the government pockets at the expense of a huge underclass of underfed people in the country,” Ms Rehman said.

“The government also used international and regional prices of commodities based on exchange rate comparison to make Pakistani prices look stable, when in reality it should be using the accounting norm of Purchasing Power Parity figures to come up with Indian and Bangladesh prices for commodities like sugar and pulses. In reality, these items were much lower priced in these countries than in Pakistan,” said Ms Rehman.