LAHORE: About half of all flour supplied in Punjab is now milled from subsidised government wheat and sold at a fixed Rs1,100 for a 10kg bag, the province’s food department said on Friday, giving the clearest picture yet of how far the government’s intervention reaches into the market.
Director General Food Amjad Hafeez said flour mills were supplying the government-wheat bags at the fixed rate, and that supplies were monitored daily in Lahore and in Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Faisalabad, Sargodha, Multan, Sahiwal, Dera Ghazi Khan and Bahawalpur. Lahore, he said, received a larger share than other districts.
The department’s own figures broadly bear out the 50 percent estimate. On Oct 13, it reported 225,525 bags of government-wheat flour out of a breakdown that added up to about 428,500 bags, or roughly 53 percent.
The other half is milled from privately procured wheat and sells at market rates. Open-market flour rose to around Rs137 a kilogram in August, compared with Rs110 a kilogram for the subsidised bags, a gap that shapes what households and tandoors pay.
Daily supply has also come down since late August, when the department reported 760,671 bags in a day.
Hafeez said digital monitoring was being introduced to make distribution more transparent, that supplies were being matched to district populations, and that the performance of officials and mills was being tracked.
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