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Rewarding failure

2025-06-03
A STATE collects taxes from its citizens to provide services to them with the aim of ensuring their collective welfare and security. Unfortunately, what tax-paying citizens are witnessing in Pakistan is the precise opposite of it.

For instance, state land is allotted to paid servants of the state for rendering the very services for which they are paid. What started as a welfare scheme for government servants has been transformed into a set of commercial benefits for them.

They are allotted multiple plots of land, and are given property taxrebates and perksthatareunheard ofevenin welfare-oriented Scandinavian countries.

The Colonial Raj may have ended, but the mindset of the paid bureaucracy has continued in essence. The British created the class to help them rule India. The bureaucracy is now ruling over the masses, which in many ways is worse than being ruled by the colonialists.

Government employees, whose salaries arefundedby the taxpayers,should serve as servants ofthe people, andnot as masters residing in state-subsidised palatial gated housing societies with luxury limousines at their disposal. In contrast, the massive majority of people remains deprived of as basic a facility as clean drinking water.

Over a couple of billion rupees have been allocated for the procurement of luxury vehicles, including 15 bulletproof ones, for the officers of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), which, it must be recalled, has failed for decades to meet revenue targets.

Is the state rewarding FBR officials for incompetence and institutionalised corruption? This appears to be the case.

Malik Tariq Ali Lahore