By Taimoor Hassan and Shahzad Paracha
W
hen Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin announced that the government was imposing an additional tax of Rs0.75 on each call exceeding the 5 minute duration during his budget speech, it took a moment and a half for it to set in how insidious the larger implications of the tax could be. The initial reaction, as with most things these days, were jibes on twitter. People joked how the tax would only really be worrying lovebirds with long calls to make regularly, and how they would now have
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to switch to WhatsApp and rely on the effectiveness of their Wifi connections. This then prompted another thought - the tax would most disproportionately affect those that do not have Wifi connections and Whatsapp. That means if a rural migrant labourer in Lahore calls his family back home for more than five minutes, they will be charged this extra tax because they either cannot afford a smartphone or do not have a stable internet connection to call over platforms like Whatsapp. Now, the government hopes to collect an estimated Rs20-30 billion through this tax. The first problem is that they are trying to milk this money disproportionately out of segments that are already pressed financially. Then there is the problem that the tax has thrown a spanner in the way the entire tele-
