"Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible." Few observations better capture the absurdity of Karachi's price-control regime, where official price lists abound, Commissioner Counters have quietly vanished, and enforcement appears to exist chiefly on paper. Karachi today offers a sobering illustration of this warning. Laws exist, notifications are issued, counters are installed, and bans are announced, yet enforcement is applied so selectively and superficially that governance has been reduced to ritual. What remains is not regulation, but the illusion of it.

One of the core statutory responsibilities of the Commissioner Karachi is the daily fixation and enforcement of prices of essential commodities, including meat, milk, poultry, vegetables and fruits. The administrative machinery appears intact. Official price lists are printed and displayed across the city. On paper, compliance seems universal. On the ground, it is almost entirely absent.

Vendors openly violate the notified prices without embarrassment or fear. The consumer, meanwhile, is placed in an impossible position: either submit quietly or invite confrontation, ridicule and hostility. Any reference to reporting the violation is brushed aside casually because experience has taught both buyer and seller the same truth: there will be no........

© The Express Tribune