The animals arrive before the city wakes.
By three in the morning, a few weeks before Eidul Azha, the livestock markets on the periphery of Karachi are already dense with noise and colour, the restless lowing of cattle from Sindh’s interior, the sharper bleating of goats driven down from Balochistan, the occasional camel standing in imperious silence while traders haggle beneath fluorescent lights.
The men who have brought these animals have been travelling for days. They have fed these animals, watered them, negotiated their passage across provincial checkpoints and absorbed the cost of fodder — the price of which has only increased in the past three years — and the ever-increasing cost of transportation, courtesy a sovereign that refuses to be fiscally responsible.
They are supply-side participants in one of Pakistan’s largest annual markets.
But no official body counts them with any precision.
Every Eidul Azha, millions of Pakistanis participate in a decentralised economic event larger than half the federal development budget. In just three days, half a trillion rupees flow through the country’s economy and half a million tonnes of protein are distributed. From livestock traders and butchers to rural farmers, transporters and tannery workers, this is the story of the vast informal economy that sustains this nation and that the state barely measures
UNDERSTANDING EID CASH FLOWS
Pakistan slaughters approximately 7.4 million animals over the three days of Eidul Azha. Cattle, buffalo, goats, sheep, camels, in that order of economic weight.
The best available national estimate for 2025, triangulated from the Pakistan Tanners Association’s (PTA) hide counts, municipal offal disposal data from seven cities, and State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) monetary flow data, puts the total national spending on Eidul Azha sacrificial animals and ancillary activities at approximately Rs641 billion in the base case, with a defensible range of Rs539-752 billion, depending on price realisation and incidentals.
Even at the lower bound, this is more than half a trillion rupees, moving through the economy in 72 hours.
To put that in context: Pakistan’s annual federal Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) allocation — the government’s entire development spending budget — was Rs1.1 trillion in FY2025. Private spending on Eidul Azha is equivalent to roughly 60 percent of the state’s annual development budget, generated not through tax collection or donor funding or institutional planning, but through the decentralised decisions of millions of households observing a religious obligation.
No ministry coordinates it. No central bank directs it. It simply happens, every year, with a precision of timing that formal planners can only envy.
Eidul Azha moves half-a-million tonnes of protein to tables across the country, transfers hundreds of billions of rupees from cities to villages, sustains an entire industrial raw material supply chain, and provides the peak income event of the year for millions of workers who are never counted in employment surveys. It does all of this without a single government directive, subsidy or implementation report.
Broad money (which refers to all cash and coins in circulation, as well as all local currency bank deposits) data, as reported by the State Bank of Pakistan, corroborates the scale independently. In the weeks before Eid 2025, ‘Currency in Circulation’ (CIC), the stock of physical cash held outside the banking system, rose by Rs619 billion from its pre-Eid baseline.
Strip out the normal seasonal drift in cash demand, and the abnormal cash pulse attributable to Eid-related spending was approximately Rs369 billion. Apply the standard transaction-equivalent multiplier, accounting for the fact that each rupee of cash is used multiple times before it returns to the banking system, and a macro cash-cycle estimate for Eid spending lands at Rs609 billion.
This is strikingly close to the Rs641 billion from the physical animal model, and the convergence of two independent methods built on entirely different data sources is the strongest possible signal that the estimate is in the right order of magnitude.
The cash tells its own story, as animals are bought and sold primarily in cash. Thereby, a spike in ‘Currency in Circulation’ is as reliable a fingerprint of economic activity as anything in the formal data.
SOURCING THE NUMBERS
The methodological challenge of estimating Eidul Azha spending is instructive because it illuminates a broader truth about Pakistan’s economy — the most important things happening in it are the hardest to measure.
There is no national qurbani [animal sacrifice] census, and the last livestock census was done more than a decade ago. To understand the nature of such a cash-rich economy, we try to triangulate the size of spending through multiple sources of data.
The first is the PTA, which counts hides and skins collected after Eid by the leather industry. Every sacrificed animal produces one hide or skin. The PTA’s 2025 figure, more than 7.4 million hides and skins, is therefore the closest available national headcount of sacrificed animals. Its weaknesses include hide spoilage, informal collection channels and cross-border leakage, suggesting that the true count is higher than what reaches the tanneries. But it provides a lower-bound anchor that is more reliable than any survey.
The second is municipal offal data. Every major city’s solid waste management authority publishes post-Eid operational reports, detailing how many tonnes of animal waste, offal, entrails, hides and carcass remains are collected and disposed of. These figures are physically tied to slaughter activity, as one cannot manufacture false offal.
Karachi’s Solid Waste Management Board collected and disposed of 76,000 tonnes of offal and animal waste over three days of Eid 2025. The Lahore Waste Management Company disposed of 54,888 tonnes across the city in the same period. Punjab province as a whole removed over 230,000 tonnes of animal waste in three days.
The third is the SBP’s weekly monetary data, the ‘Currency in Circulation’ series that is embedded in the Broad Money (M2) dataset. The pre-Eid cash spike, once isolated from normal seasonal variation, is a macro-scale fingerprint of economic activity that no amount of underreporting or informal transacting can entirely obscure.
Turkey’s central bank documented an identical phenomenon for its own Eidul Azha celebration, wherein the cash pulse is a universal feature of Islamic festival economies where livestock is purchased for cash.
All three methods largely converge on Rs600-650 billion. The conclusion is not that any individual method is perfect, but that the underlying economic reality is large enough to show up clearly through three different lenses, each with its own blind spots.
THE CHAIN
Consider the supply chain of a single cow. It was likely bred and raised in rural Punjab or Sindh or Balochistan. The farmer who owns it fed it for months on fodder purchased from local traders, and may have taken a short-term loan, informally, from a commission agent or a moneylender, to finance the feed cost in the weeks (or even months) before Eid.
The animal was then sold, either directly at a roadside mandi [marketplace] or through a chain of two to three intermediary traders, each extracting a margin. Transport was hired, a truck, or a three-wheeled vehicle for smaller animals, adding income to the logistics sector.
In the city, the animal was held at a temporary mandi where stall fees were paid, and where fodder sellers and water vendors extracted their share. After purchase, a butcher was hired to perform the slaughter and cut the meat. This is, for thousands of professional butchers across urban Pakistan, the single-most economically productive week of their year. The hide went to a collector, who sold it to the tannery supply chain.
Every link in that chain becomes a rural-to-urban or informal-to-formal income event. The directional flow of this money matters enormously. As Pakistan’s GDP growth model has long been driven by urban consumption and remittance-backed demand, agricultural incomes, which support roughly 40 percent of the population, are chronically undercounted and structurally under-stimulated by government policy.
AN URBAN-TO-RURAL TRANSFER
Eidul Azha is one of the few moments when a large, clean, unconditional income transfer from urban-to-rural Pakistan occurs at scale, driven entirely by private religious obligation rather than government subsidy or development programmes.
An average cattle animal in 2025 sold for approximately Rs110,000 at mass-market rates — not the premium animals that appear in viral social media videos, but the median cow that the majority of urban households buy, often collectively, through a seven-shares arrangement.
Of that price, the livestock farmer retains somewhere between 55 and 65 percent, after paying trader margins and transport — a rough estimate, given the opacity of the mandi system, but consistent with value-chain analyses of Pakistan’s livestock sector.
On seven million animals averaging Rs60,000 to the farmer, that is Rs420 billion flowing into rural and peri-urban household incomes over a single week. The equivalent of a medium-sized development programme, except it happens every year without fail.
Karachi alone is estimated to have spent Rs185 billion on Eidul Azha in 2025, approximately 29 percent of the national total, from a city that accounts for roughly 15 percent of the national population.
The offal data is the anchor here, as the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board (SSWMB), Karachi’s municipal solid waste authority, collected 76,000 tonnes of offal and animal waste over three Eid days. Working back from species-weighted offal yield per animal, this implies approximately 2.2 million sacrificed animals within the city’s collection perimeter, estimated to be around 945,000 cattle, 1.1 million goats, 110,000 sheep, and roughly 6,600 camels.
The cattle count is what makes Karachi distinctive. Its species mix — approximately 43 percent cattle, 50 percent goats, reflects a city in which the seven-shares cow arrangement has become the dominant mode of participation for middle-income households.
Seven shares means seven households pooling their resources to sacrifice one cow. It is the mechanism through which Eidul Azha democratises participation, reducing the per-household entry price. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have formalised this arrangement, publishing per-share and per-animal prices annually and providing a mass-market price anchor that is often more representative of actual transaction prices than mandi headlines.
PROTEIN TO THE PEOPLE
Seven million animals yield meat. Specifically, they yield approximately 532,000 tonnes of edible meat, a figure derived from species-weighted meat-yield assumptions across the 2025 national headcount. At the conservative base-case spending of Rs641 billion, this implies an effective price of Rs1,203 per kilogramme of edible meat produced through the qurbani system.
That cost-per-kilogramme figure tells a story that neither the religious nor the economic framing of Eidul Azha typically acknowledges. Half a million tonnes of meat are distributed in three days, largely through a system of voluntary redistribution mandated by Islamic practice, one-third retained by the household, one-third to relatives and neighbours, one-third to the poor.
The state spends tens of billions annually on food subsidy and social protection programmes that distribute far less protein to far fewer people, with far greater administrative friction.
The targeting of this meat distribution is imperfect, it follows social networks rather than poverty maps, and urban poor with weak social ties may receive less than rural communities with dense kinship networks. But the scale of redistribution is real, and it is achieved without a single government form, helpline or district officer. Eid-ul-Azha is Pakistan’s largest annual food redistribution event, and it is run entirely by private citizens acting on religious conviction.
THE HEALTH OF THE ECONOMY
There is a development economics argument waiting to be made here about the undervalued social infrastructure embedded in religious practice, the way that institutions such as zakat, qurbani and sadqa [voluntary charity] operate as informal insurance mechanisms for communities that formal social protection has not reached.
Among the most elegant pieces of evidence in this analysis is what the State Bank’s weekly monetary data reveals about Pakistan’s cash economy.
In the two weeks before Eidul Azha 2025 in early June, ‘Currency in Circulation’ rose from Rs10,296 billion to a peak of Rs10,915 billion, a gross run-up of Rs619 billion. After Eid, cash began returning to the banking system — by late June, Rs280 billion had returned.
The return ratio, the fraction of withdrawn cash that returns to the banking system within four weeks, was approximately 45 percent in 2025. The remainder does not disappear, it circulates in the informal economy, paying for goods and services that never touch a bank account. This is the texture of Pakistan’s cash economy, a monetary stock moving through channels that formal financial infrastructure barely glimpses. Eidul Azha, for three days, lights it up.
The 2024 cycle was even more pronounced, an abnormal cash pulse of Rs475 billion producing a macro spending estimate of Rs783 billion, the highest in the four-year series. The 2023 figure, by contrast, was subdued at Rs225 billion, consistent with an economically stressed Eid, in which animal volumes contracted and households downgraded their sacrifice choices.
The cash cycle does not lie about the direction of economic confidence. Its variation across years tracks living standards in ways that headline GDP growth rates obscure.
THE INVISIBLE ECONOMY
Behind every tonne of offal in a SSWMB logistics report is a person.
Somewhere in the Malir or Bin Qasim area, Mohammad Akram may have just completed his busiest three days of the year as a butcher. He earns, by conservative estimates, Rs1,500-2,500 per animal for the slaughter and cutting service and, on each of the three Eid days, he and his apprentices may process eight to 12 animals.
In a normal month, he earns Rs25,000-35,000 as a neighbourhood halal meat cutter. In these three days, he earns more than he does in six weeks. He does not appear in any formal employment survey. His income is not taxed, not tracked and not counted in any quarterly economic indicator.
In Rahim Yar Khan, Ghulam Abbas, a livestock trader, has been buying and selling cattle for three months in preparation for this week. He purchased animals from smallholder farmers in the canal colonies at Rs75,000-90,000 and sold them in Karachi and Lahore mandis at Rs110,000-130,000. His margin, after mandi fees, fodder en route, and the inevitable animals that lost condition during transport, was perhaps 15-20 percent per successful animal.
He operates entirely in cash. He has no Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC)-registered business, no national tax number (NTN), and neither a bank account into which he routinely deposits income. He is, statistically, invisible, since all of the above is not counted in any quarterly economic indicator.
And in a village in Muzaffargarh, a farmer who has been feeding a buffalo for six months, spending regularly on fodder, finally sells the animal, for potentially his largest single cash transaction of his year. It pays off the informal credit he was extended from his local commission agent to finance the feed.
It puts money into his wife’s hands for household expenditure they have deferred since winter. It buys school supplies for September and repairs a roof that has leaked since the last monsoon. This one transaction moving from an urban Karachi household to a rural Muzaffargarh smallholder is what an economist would call a wealth transfer, and what a sociologist might call a solidarity mechanism, but it is just really a religious festival.
The absence of a national qurbani census is not merely an accounting inconvenience. It reflects a structural incapacity in Pakistan’s statistical machinery to measure its own informal economy and, by extension, to understand where welfare actually comes from and how it flows.
The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ national accounts methodology relies on formal sector production, tax-registered enterprises and periodic household surveys. None of these instruments are designed to capture a Rs641 billion informal market event that is over in three days and leaves no paper trail beyond a municipal waste disposal report.
This is consequential for policy. If the state does not know that rural livestock farmers receive an annual Rs400-plus billion income boost from Eidul Azha demand, it cannot model what happens to agricultural household incomes when urban purchasing power declines.
If it does not know that 532,000 tonnes of protein are redistributed privately in three days, it cannot calibrate its own food security interventions against that baseline.
If it does not know that Rs609 billion of cash circulates through informal channels over Eid week, it cannot design monetary policy or financial inclusion programmes that speak to where cash actually goes.
COUNTING WHAT ALREADY EXISTS
There are tractable improvements available. The PTA already produces an annual hide count. The state should formalise this into an official livestock sacrifice census with provincial disaggregation.
Municipal waste management authorities already produce offal tonnage reports. A standardised template, mandated by the Ministry of National Food Security, could convert these operational records into a usable annual economic dataset.
The State Bank already publishes weekly CIC data. A dedicated Eidul Azha monetary analysis, published annually, would give policymakers a macro cash-cycle baseline, against which to track informal sector health.
None of these reforms require new institutions, new laws or new money, but only the administrative will to count what already exists.
There is a version of this article that ends with a set of policy prescriptions, which call to formalise livestock markets, expand banking access for traders, rationalise hide collection and integrate qurbani data into national accounts. That version is not wrong, but it misses a more fundamental observation that Pakistan’s formal economy, the one that shows up in fiscal accounts, monetary reports, and GDP growth announcements, is smaller and weaker than the economy people actually live in.
The state taxes perhaps 12 percent of the GDP. The formal banking sector serves perhaps a third of the adult population, not counting laughably restricted wallets masquerading as accounts. Formal employment, by most estimates, covers fewer than 15 percent of workers. Everything else, the livestock trader, the itinerant butcher, the hide collector, the mandi fodder seller, operates in a parallel economy that is not broken or failed. It is functional, adaptive and deeply connected to the social and religious institutions that give Pakistani life its rhythms.
Eidul Azha spends Rs641 billion in 72 hours, moves half-a-million tonnes of protein to tables across the country, transfers hundreds of billions of rupees from cities to villages, sustains an entire industrial raw material supply chain, and provides the peak income event of the year for millions of workers who are never counted in employment surveys.
It does all of this without a single government directive, subsidy or implementation report. It is, in the most literal sense, the people’s economy, running on faith, obligation and the irreplaceable social technology of a 14 century-old institution.
The animal arrives before the city wakes.
The trader has been on the road for days. The butcher sharpens his knife. The tannery lights up its furnaces. And somewhere in Muzaffargarh, a farmer holds cash in his hand for the first time in months and thinks about the roof. The state should learn to see all of this. It has been happening, at scale, for as long as there have been cities in this country — the numbers exist, someone just has to count them.
The writer is a macroeconomist and
professor of practice at IBA, Karachi.
He can be reached at ammar.habib@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, EOS, May 24th, 2026
