LAHORE/KARACHI: The district administration appears to be failing to ensure the sale of milk and yoghurt at official prices, with both commodities continuing to sell in the open market at rates far above the notified schedule.
The district administration has fixed the official price of milk at Rs170 per litre. In the open market, however, milk is selling at between Rs200 and Rs230 per litre.
The price of yoghurt has similarly moved beyond the reach of many households. In the open market, yogurt is being sold at between Rs260 and Rs280 per kilogramme.
Residents say milk and yoghurt are among the basic items of daily use, but that the failure to enforce the official price schedule is forcing them to pay a premium.
Citizens have demanded that the district administration ensure implementation of official rates for milk and yoghurt, and act against those selling the commodities above the fixed price.
Arbitrary pricing of flour is also continuing in Karachi.
In the city, the official price of flour from small chakkis is fixed at Rs145, but it is selling at Rs170 and above.
According to small chakki owners, the reason for the increase is the rising price of wheat in the open market. Wheat is currently trading in the open market at between Rs136 and Rs140 per kilogramme.
Pakistan’s district price-magistracy system, operating under the Punjab Foodstuffs (Control) Act and its provincial equivalents, is built on a simple premise: a deputy commissioner notifies a maximum retail price, and magistrates fine or seal shops that exceed it.
The system works reasonably well for commodities where the supply chain is short and the margin structure is known. It works poorly for milk, and the reasons are structural rather than administrative.
More than 90 per cent of Pakistan’s milk moves through an informal chain of small producers, village collectors, dodhis and neighbourhood shops, with almost no cold-chain infrastructure and no documented cost of production. When a notified retail price is set without reference to the farmgate price and the collector’s margin, the notification cannot be met without someone in the chain selling at a loss — so it simply is not met, and enforcement becomes a matter of periodic raids rather than sustained compliance.
The Lahore Milk Retailers Association has repeatedly made this argument in court, and the price schedule has been contested in litigation more than once. The result is a familiar equilibrium: an official rate that exists on paper, a market rate that everybody pays, and periodic crackdowns that briefly close shops without changing either number.
The Karachi flour figures illustrate the same logic from the input side. When open-market wheat trades at Rs136–140 per kilogramme, a chakki cannot mill and sell flour at Rs145 and cover its costs. The gap is arithmetic, not avarice.
The policy answer, unglamorous as it is, lies upstream: transparent farmgate pricing, cold-chain investment in dairy, and a wheat release policy that stabilises the input cost before the retail price is notified. Until then, the enforcement drive will continue to be announced every few months and to fail every few months.
-with additional input reported by Abu Bakr Arshad
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