PM Dangles Rs25m Loans While Youth Pay in Debt

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has decided, from the chair of a meeting of officials, that young Pakistanis may now borrow up to Rs25 million each under the Prime Minister's Youth Business and Agriculture Loan Schemes. The old ceiling was Rs7.5 million. The money comes, in the prime minister's phrasing, "in easy instalments." It's still a loan, and every rupee of it is owed.

Who Has the Power

The decision was taken at a meeting the prime minister chaired himself, with Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Youth Affairs Rana Mashhood Ahmad Khan and Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Political Affairs Talha Barqi in attendance. The people who'll carry the debt weren't listed among the attendees. They never are.

The prime minister praised Aurangzeb and his team for "effective arrangements to provide financial support to young people." He directed that the minimum age for applicants drop from 21 to 18, so that teenagers can enter business and farming earlier. Eighteen-year-olds, then, get an earlier invitation into the debt relationship with the state's lending apparatus.

The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority, SMEDA, was ordered to supply guidance, consultancy and technical support. A countrywide awareness campaign was ordered too, so that "more applicants could benefit." The state will spend effort making sure the product gets sold.

The Numbers They Brought

The briefing put Rs292 billion on the table for 2026-27, with 30 per cent of youth loans reserved for women. The prime minister said the reservation would help women "achieve economic independence" and take part in business. Independence, in this arrangement, arrives through an application to the government's scheme.

Since January 2023, according to the briefing, 581,341 young people have received loans worth Rs313.9 billion. Officials called that 10 times the number of beneficiaries over the preceding 10 years. For 2026-27, an estimated 266,700 young people are expected to receive loans worth Rs292 billion. Do the division: the figures imply roughly Rs1.1 million per borrower on average, a long way from the Rs25 million headline ceiling that's being waved around.

That gap matters. A ceiling isn't a payout. Who gets approved, at what size, and on whose say-so, are questions the briefing didn't answer, and the people deciding sit inside the same hierarchy that wrote the scheme.

What They're Calling "Empowerment"

The prime minister said young people were "a valuable asset for Pakistan" and that the government was committed to "empowering them, harnessing their potential and providing them with decent and productive employment opportunities." Note the vocabulary. Assets get harnessed. The state holds the harness and the ledger.

Nothing in the briefing describes young people organizing their own credit, pooling their own resources, or deciding collectively how to farm or trade. The scheme runs one direction: from the top, through the finance ministry, down to individual applicants who must come forward one by one, forms in hand, and compete for a slice of Rs292 billion. Individual borrowers carrying individual debts are easier to manage than communities that share what they have.

The base facts leave an open question the officials didn't raise: what happens to the borrower who can't repay? The briefing is silent on defaults, collateral and enforcement. It's loud only on volume, on how many were reached and how many more will be.

The meeting ended the way these meetings end, with praise handed up and directives handed down. The ones expected to sign for the loans were told they should be grateful.