• Govt spends only 41.5pc of development budget in first nine months
• PSDP already cut by Rs90bn to fund fuel subsidies
• Parliamentarians’ schemes see 70pc utilisation in just four months

ISLAMABAD: Barring about 70 per cent utilisation of public funds for ruling parliamentarians’ schemes, the government and its agencies struggled with the development programme, spending less than half of the…

ISLAMABAD: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has asked Pakistan to eliminate distortions in petroleum pricing at the earliest, even though it had tacitly accepted the Rs152 billion subsidy cap extended by the federal government to consumers amid a historic global price surge following the US-Israel attacks on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Senior officials told _Dawn_ that the…