{"id":41525,"date":"2026-02-23T21:04:29","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T21:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=41525"},"modified":"2026-02-23T21:04:29","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T21:04:29","slug":"pti-claims-9m-pushedinto-poverty-in-punjab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=41525","title":{"rendered":"PTI claims 9m pushedinto poverty in Punjab"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>PTI Central Information Secretary Sheikh Waqas Akram has alleged that nine million additional people have been pushed into poverty in Punjab, while the government spent Rs11 billion on a luxury aircraft.<\/p>\n<p>He warned that the country&#8217;s economic freefall would continue until the public mandate is restored.<\/p>\n<p>In a hard-hitting statement, Sheikh Waqas claimed that a glaring and suspicious black hole existed in the government&#8217;s data timeline.<\/p>\n<p>He noted that the official survey deliberately skipped the critical 2022\u00962024 period, jumping from 2019 straight to 2025 and clubbing six years of data together in a calculated attempt to conceal the economic devastation unleashed during the first PDM tenure.<\/p>\n<p>The PTI leader asserted that the omission was deliberate, stressing that the government concealed the 2022\u00962023 figures because their transparent release would have shown that under the Imran Khan-led PTI government, the economy remained stable and achieved growth of around 6% despite the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>He said that this hard-earned progress was systematically dismantled by the current rulers after toppling the PTI&#8217;s well-performing government through &#8220;a regime change conspiracy&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He strongly slammed the government, accusing it of orchestrating a planned humanitarian disaster through incompetence, ineptness, shortsightedness and self-serving royal behavior, which, he said, had pushed millions of Pakistani families into hunger and despair amid backbreaking inflation and a sharp erosion of public purchasing power.<\/p>\n<p>Sheikh Waqas stated that the economic devastation was reflected in the government&#8217;s own recently released poverty survey. &#8220;The figures released by the Ministry of Planning are not just statistics; they are a charge sheet against the PDM-2 regime,&#8221; stated Sheikh Waqas.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In just a few years, this government has reversed a hard-won economic progress during Imran Khan-led PTI government.&#8221; He pointed out that the national poverty rate had surged from 21.9% in 2018-19 to 28.8% in 2024-25.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PTI Central Information Secretary Sheikh Waqas Akram has alleged that nine million additional people have been pushed into poverty in Punjab, while the government spent Rs11 billion on a luxury aircraft. He warned that the country&#8217;s economic freefall would continue until the public mandate is restored. In a hard-hitting statement, Sheikh Waqas claimed that a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}