Pakistan federal minister Chaudhry Fawad Hussain has blamed the past governments for the current economic situation in the country and said that the former rulers have ruined the "national economy during their 10 years of misrule".
He believed that the amount was being used for debt servicing could be used to offset the price hike, reported The News International.
In a statement on Twitter, the information minister said had the government not repaid 12 billion dollars in debt, the amount could have been used to provide subsidy in the prices of oil and electricity.
He said that the country's current economic crisis was a "gift of 10-year rule of Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif," adding that had the former rulers not ruined the national economy during their 10 years of misrule, the consumers could have been protected from the adverse effects of rising prices of commodities in the international market, The News International reported.
Earlier, Pakistan's Awami National Party (ANP) has launched a hunger strike camp against the Imran Khan government and said that he had not fulfilled the promises he had made with the nation before the general elections.
A senior leader of the Pakhtun nationalist party Ghulam Ahmad Bilour said that the prices of edible items, petroleum products and other daily-use commodities had almost doubled under the governance of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).
Pakistan's joblessness has jumped from 5.8 per cent in 2017-18 to 6.9 per cent in 2018-19, according to the Labour Force Survey (LFS) published by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).
The first year of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf in power saw an increase in unemployment in the case of both males and females, with the male unemployment rate rising from 5.1 per cent to 5.9 per cent and female unemployment rate jumping from 8.3 per cent to 10 per cent, reported Dawn.
( With inputs from ANI )
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