Perhaps the most successful political trick that’s been played in Pakistan has been to make people believe that survival is a personal responsibility.

When electricity becomes too expensive, a household is told to consume less. When the petrol rate rises, people are advised to travel carefully. When food prices climb, families are expected to adjust their kitchens. When water does not arrive, those who can afford it arrange a tanker. When public hospitals fail, people find a private doctor. When public schools fail, they pay for a private one.

The citizen is continually asked to become more economical, more patient, more resilient, as though the country’s economic problems begin and end inside the household. This is how a political failure becomes a private inconvenience.

And perhaps this is why the Pakistani middle class is so difficult to see. It is not poor enough to be counted among those who require immediate relief, nor wealthy enough to escape the consequences of a failing public system. It works, pays taxes, sends children to school, pays its bills and keeps going. Its hardship rarely arrives as a dramatic collapse.

Pakistan’s middle class is being squeezed, not just by inflation, but by the growing cost of privately securing the essentials for an ‘ordinary’, everyday life. As electricity, water, education, healthcare and transport become increasingly expensive or unreliable, households are repeatedly told to adjust and become more resilient, turning what should be political questions into private calculations

Pakistan’s middle class is being squeezed, not just by inflation, but by the growing cost of privately securing the essentials for an ‘ordinary’, everyday life. As electricity, water, education, healthcare and transport become increasingly expensive or unreliable, households are repeatedly told to adjust and become more resilient, turning what should be political questions into private calculations

It appears instead as a gradual narrowing of life: the savings that do not accumulate, the treatment that is postponed, the house that remains rented, the child whose education becomes a financial calculation, the young graduate who begins to regard departure from the country as an economic necessity rather than a choice.

There is something politically disturbing about this quietness. We have become accustomed to discussing the cost of living as though it were the weather: unpleasant, unavoidable and beyond anyone’s control. Yet, prices are not weather. Tariffs are not weather. Taxes are not weather. Public expenditure is not weather. They are decisions made by governments, negotiated with institutions, shaped by powerful interests and ultimately paid for by citizens.

Pakistan’s latest household data makes the contradiction difficult to ignore. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics reports that average monthly household income from 2024-25 was Rs82,179, against an average monthly consumption expenditure of Rs79,150. The margin is scarcely Rs3,000.

That is not a measure of poverty in itself, and national averages conceal enormous differences between households, but it tells us something about the fragility of ordinary life. Once the month’s necessities have been paid for, there is very little room left for the future. A medical emergency, a period of unemployment, a rise in school fees or a major household repair can turn a seemingly stable family into a borrowing family with remarkable speed.

Yet, we continue to call this class ‘secure’. But ‘secure’ against what?

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics reports that average monthly household income from 2024-25 was Rs82,179, against an average monthly consumption expenditure of Rs79,150. The margin is scarcely Rs3,000. That is not a measure of poverty in itself, and national averages conceal enormous differences between households, but it tells us something about the fragility of ordinary life. Once the month’s necessities have been paid for, there is very little room left for the future.

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics reports that average monthly household income from 2024-25 was Rs82,179, against an average monthly consumption expenditure of Rs79,150. The margin is scarcely Rs3,000. That is not a measure of poverty in itself, and national averages conceal enormous differences between households, but it tells us something about the fragility of ordinary life. Once the month’s necessities have been paid for, there is very little room left for the future.

WHEN PUBLIC FAILURE BECOMES PRIVATE COST

The question becomes more serious when the costs of the things a household cannot reasonably live without are considered.

Electricity, for example, has become one of the most politically revealing household expenses in the country. Pakistan’s power sector remains burdened by circular debt, inefficient distribution and costly generation, while consumers are repeatedly asked to absorb the consequences through tariffs and surcharges.

In February 2026, Reuters reported that proposed changes to the tariff structure under Pakistan’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme could place a substantially greater burden on middle-income electricity consumers, with analysts warning of sharp increases for some households, even as industrial users were considered for lower rates.

The significance of this is larger than the bill itself. Electricity is now woven into the ordinary conditions of life: cooling a room through an increasingly severe summer, preserving food, pumping water, working from home or studying after dark. To tell a household simply to consume less is to overlook the fact that the modern household has been built around electricity.

Therefore, the question is not only how much electricity people use, but why the cost of using an essential public service has become a recurring source of economic insecurity.

Water carries the same contradiction in a different form. Karachi, a city whose relationship with water has been shaped by shortage, unequal distribution and a........

© Dawn (Magazines)