Daily Times Editorials 14th September 2026

Lasting Relief

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has moved quickly to soften another painful rise in fuel prices, announcing Rs100-per-litre relief for motorcycles, rickshaws and cars of up to 800cc. The concession will apply to a monthly quota of 20 litres for two- and three-wheelers and 30 litres for eligible cars. With petrol at Rs 375.82 a litre and diesel above Rs 403, few households will regard Rs 2,000 or Rs 3,000 in monthly relief as insignificant. The decision is timely, targeted and considerably more defensible than making cheap petrol available indiscriminately to every vehicle on the road.

Pakistan has now lived through enough oil shocks to know the script. Trouble erupts somewhere beyond our borders, international prices rise, the rupee feels the strain, transport costs climb, and Islamabad begins searching for fiscal room to cushion the blow. This time, the disruption is particularly dangerous, with Hormuz under pressure and Saudi oil routes towards the Red Sea facing their own uncertainty. The country can influence diplomacy around these crises, but it cannot price international crude.

What it can change is the amount of imported petrol required for an ordinary Pakistani to reach work. Its transport economy has made the motorcycle an economic necessity for millions because reliable public transport remains scarce outside a handful of corridors. Recent research has also shown how quickly behaviour changes when an affordable alternative appears: Punjab reported roughly 60 per cent higher ridership during fare-free days in April.Send Money Overseas

Since the government already has vehicle databases, CNIC-linked payment infrastructure and experience using digital wallets for transport subsidies, it should consider building towards a mobility allowance for lower-income households that can be spent on petrol, buses, trains or an electric motorcycle instalment.

There is an even larger opportunity sitting on two wheels. The government itself has recognised that electrifying motorcycles offers one of the fastest routes towards lower fuel imports. In April, the prime minister ordered faster implementation of electric-motorcycle subsidies, expansion of charging infrastructure and a gradual switch of official buses and motorcycles to electricity. The government plans to have 30 per cent of vehicles running on electricity within five years, with potential fuel savings estimated at $4.5 billion. Why, then, should every rupee of motorcycle relief end at the petrol pump? A rider could eventually be offered a choice: collect the monthly fuel concession or assign part of it towards financing an electric bike.

There are harder choices too. The political demand to abolish the petroleum levy is understandable when the government is collecting Rs 114 per litre in taxes and duties on petrol. Jamaat-i-Islami’s recent campaign has forced a legitimate debate over how heavily ordinary commuters should be taxed during an extraordinary external shock. Yet an across-the-board tax cut would deliver the largest absolute benefit to those consuming the most fuel while simultaneously weakening revenues.

Lasting relief will require Islamabad to spend less energy making every litre affordable and more effort reducing the number of imported litres households need in the first place. *

Selective South

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the BRICS summit in New Delhi this week that the Global South must graduate from being a “rule-taker” to becoming a “rule-shaper.” It may have been a good slogan, but it also raised a long list of questions India would rather not answer.

The summit itself supplied a persuasive argument for BRICS. Eleven countries representing nearly half the world’s population and about 40 per cent of global output managed to agree on a declaration despite a war that has placed some of their members on opposing sides. Iran endorsed language calling for “maximum restraint.” So did the UAE, which has itself been hit by Iranian projectiles during the conflict. President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed also met on the sidelines, the highest-level encounter between their governments since the war began.

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If Tehran had ample reason to arrive aggrieved, Abu Dhabi had equally compelling reasons to resist language that appeared to excuse Iranian attacks. Yet both remained inside the room and accepted a document neither could have written alone. This is what serious multilateralism looks like: countries need not agree on the war to agree that they still have business with one another.

China appeared to understand the economic side of that proposition rather better than most. President Xi Jinping arrived with proposals rather than adjectives: an integrated BRICS market, cooperation on industrial and supply chains, an AI Open Source Zone, a Special Economic Zone partnership and a services trade forum to be hosted by China next year. Even if India deserves credit for shepherding a difficult declaration through a divided summit, this is also where PM Modi’s larger claim runs into India’s own neighbourhood policy. Pakistan applied for BRICS membership in 2023. Islamabad has publicly argued that its membership would advance the very “inclusive multilateralism” that BRICS claims to represent, while media sources continue to identify Indian opposition as the central obstacle. New Delhi is entitled to have disputes with Pakistan. It is not entitled to turn those disputes into a philosophy of global governance and then complain that established powers do the same thing to developing countries.Sindh News Headlines

There is also something particularly awkward about India demanding that the old international order abandon its “pyramid of privilege” while preserving a veto of convenience closer to home. If BRICS is to become merely another club in which the powerful decide which neighbours are respectable enough to enter, it will have reproduced in miniature precisely the hierarchy it was created to contest. *