Islamabad is preparing for another IMF review, and the script feels tired before it begins. A team of officials will carry fresh promises of reform, the Fund will demand austerity, and by the end of it, another tranche will be released or delayed. The pattern is so familiar that the real story (what this cycle does to ordinary Pakistanis) is often lost between press releases.
To give credit where it is due, the government has not stood idle. BISP stipends have been expanded, Punjab’s new compliance drive has shown bite, and Sindh has tried to rebuild schools wrecked by floods. Electricity-bill waivers for flood-hit homes, and now a cautious willingness to put the poor back into policy debates, are all welcome steps.
These gestures matter. They suggest someone in power recognises that IMF conditions, if enforced without cushions, can push millions over the edge. But good intentions are not enough when the public mood is defined by shrinking meals, shuttered shops, and bills that arrive like punishments.
All you need to see the real cost of the “structural adjustments” politely debated in Washington is a peek within a middle-class family. Families cutting back to one meal a day, children dropping out of school, and small shopkeepers giving up because power tariffs-adjusted to please creditors-eat into every rupee of profit.
Civil society groups keep repeating what policymakers ignore: IMF bailouts are not poison by themselves. They can stabilise if paired with integrity and a social contract. But here, “reforms” have too often meant taxing the honest while smuggling mafias, cartels, and power-sector leeches escape untouched. Every government vows to confront them, every government blinks.
This review comes at a moment of fatigue. Climate disasters are only expected to grow more vicious. Yet the policy debate is still trapped within deficit targets and subsidy cuts, as though the economy can be balanced on paper while society crumbles outside.
If Shehbaz Sharif’s government wants to turn the page, it must show that negotiations are not about surrendering dignity for dollars but about defending citizens from despair. The IMF, too, would have to realise that resilience is not built on austerity alone. Stability bought at the cost of hungry children and darkened classrooms is no stability at all. *
