by Faisal Shakeel

Eleven years old Ali Ahsan breathed his last under the debris of a wall, which collapsed in a stampede caused by baton-wielding policemen dispersing a crowd buying subsidised wheat flour on September 2.

On that day, hundreds of people had queued up to save Rs130 (roughly $1.50) on a 20kg bag of flour from a makeshift sale point in village Chuhr Jamali - some 130 kilometres away from Karachi, the financial hub of Pakistan.

The incident took place when the policemen tasked with keeping discipline at all such sale points set up by the government across the country in Ramadan - tried to subdue the protest, which started after a policeman took away out of turn a bag of flour.

Third among the six of the siblings, Ali never went to a school because his father, who earns less than two dollars a day, could not afford his tuition fee. While Ali’s family decided not to lodge a case against anyone to save itself the trouble of a procedure that seldom works for the poor, the authorities considered it enough to suspend three policemen for inefficiency to handle the situation at the sale point.

Who saved the $1.50 Ali died trying to save for his family that day? Anyone interested in finding out the answers should read the newspapers peppered nowadays with reports on cartels holding back stocks of sugar and flour to push their prices up.

Despite tall claims, the government seems helpless to resolve the situation because of the influence of an overwhelming majority of the millers, who sit in the corridors of power. “Today sugar-mill ownership cuts across the political spectrum, the who’s who of the sugar industry reading like a who’s who of politics,” writes a journalist-turned-parliamentarian, Ayaz Amir, in South Asian News Agency while commenting on the situation.