All you need to know about PSBA Act 2025 and why it still deserves attention

The Punjab Sahulat Bazaars Authority Act, passed in early 2025 as Bill No. 22, is one of those pieces of provincial legislation that attracted modest coverage when it cleared the Assembly and rather more attention afterwards. 

A year on, with the Authority’s footprint visibly larger than that of its predecessor company, the case for revisiting the legal architecture has grown. The substantive shift is straightforward. 

Until 2025, the body that operated the network of model bazaars across Punjab was a Section 42 not-for-profit company called the Punjab Model Bazaars Management Company.

 It had been incorporated in 2016. Section 42 status carries certain operational advantages — corporate governance, autonomy from line departments — but it also carries limits. A company cannot levy charges in the same way a statutory body can. It cannot easily acquire state land for public purposes. Its financial reporting goes to its members rather than to the legislature. A statutory authority can do all of these. 

Naveed Rafaqat Ahmad, who took charge of the company and later led the Authority as its first Director General, has spoken in several interviews about why he pushed for the legislative upgrade. The case he made, in the run-up to the Bill, was that operational scale required statutory backing. 

“The shift from PMBMC to PSBA has been a game-changer,” he said at the time of the Act’s passage, citing land acquisition, procurement, and the speed of decision-making as the practical wins. The Bill was steered through the Assembly by Industries Minister Mujtaba Shujaur Rehman and signed into law in March 2025. 

 The Authority is required to lay an annual performance report before the Punjab Assembly. It is given limited indemnity for actions taken in good faith, but it remains subject to audit by the Auditor General of Pakistan. This is a tighter governance architecture than was previously in place. The earlier company structure required filing accounts with the Securities and Exchange Commission and answering to its members. 

The Authority now answers, in effect, to the legislature. In a public sector context that has not always rewarded transparency, this is a non-trivial change. It is also unusual to have technical-expert seats specified in the statute itself; most Pakistani public bodies leave those positions to executive discretion, which over time tends to convert them into political ones. Mr Ahmad has been candid about what the legislative shift was supposed to deliver.

The first two are familiar phrases in any Pakistani reform debate. The third is harder to verify, but the numbers suggest that the scale has at least begun to follow the legislation. From under thirty bazaars in the company era, the network now operates 49 permanent bazaars, 15 mobile units under the Sahulat on the Go programme, and a temporary footprint of eleven Ramzan bazaars during the 2026 holy month. Annual footfall is estimated by Ipsos at 189 million.

For policy researchers, the more interesting question is whether the statutory model has produced the kind of accountability that its proponents claimed. Two academic papers, in the Review of Education, Administration and Law and the Pakistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, have examined the question, and both have concluded that the legal reconstruction did materially change PSBA’s behaviour. Independent third-party evaluations between 2020 and 2024 placed the body’s predecessor company near the top of a peer group of fifteen Pakistani public-sector entities, with a composite score of 86 out of 100.

The critique is not unreasonable, but the data does suggest the supplementation is real: Ipsos found that prices for nineteen essential commodities at PSBA bazaars during Ramzan 2026 were on average lower than the rates notified by the Deputy Commissioner. There is also the question of replicability.

The Ministry of Planning has expressed interest in extending the Sahulat on the Go format to Islamabad. Whether the underlying statute can travel as easily as the operational model is a separate matter. The PSBA Act is a Punjab statute; Islamabad and other provinces would need to legislate their own. The Authority’s experience suggests that the legal carrier is not incidental.

The legislation, in other words, is not the headline story. The headline is the bazaar network and the household savings it produces. But the legal carrier is what gives the headline its durability. That, more than anything, is the case for reading the PSBA Act of 2025 with a little more care than it has so far received.