And the industry-of the-year award goes to: ammo manufacturers. Stuck in a war like economy, arms and ammunition is doing big business with consumers from all walks of life scrambling around to get their hands on their favorite piece.
The terrorists want it for obvious reasons, the army and police need it to hunt down the increased number of bad guys, the growing private security industry is looking for bulk deals as they penetrate further in residential and commercial centers thanks to captive demand, while once shy office-goers also try to purchase a basic weapon for the sake of their familys security.
Then there is another group, which reportedly purchased at least 40,000 weapons since August 2007.
Sources earlier revealed to this newspaper that Sindh Home Department alone issued more than 40,000 arms licenses to party workers on secretarial, ministerial and MPAs quota, vis-à-vis a little more than 85,000 licenses issued between 2002 to 2007. Reportedly, this is the record number of licenses issued by the home department, to party workers, ever in the countrys 62 year history.
Assuming the weapons weren purchased to celebrate the onset of new decade, perhaps one can construe that political workers are also afraid of ongoing security threats and the law & order situation, and simply seek protection against untoward incidents.
This makes sense. After all, total number of crimes as reported by the Federal Bureau of Statistics has been persistently rising over the past many years. And these include all sorts of rogue jobs; from menial mobile and wallet snatching to more gruff works like kidnapping, riots, robbery and so forth (see graph).
This is despite increased government spending on police and civil defence. Government officials say that budgetary spending on police has risen manifolds with the police-to-army expense ratio jumping to 1:3 today from 1:10 ten years ago.
Whether or not, the police are efficient in its job is another question. But, given higher arms sales, one fear won be out of proportion: people are losing confidence in police and may just take the law in their own hands, if and when time comes. Those trigger-happy boys on the streets are always looking for an opportunity, anyway.
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