NA Secretariat sends 50% of staff home, halves official fuel for 3 months

Two federal austerity notifications landed on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, and both are about fuel rather than salaries.

The National Assembly Secretariat ordered half its staff to work from home on rotation and cut fuel for official vehicles by 50 per cent for three months. Separately, the Ministry of Railways cut official fuel allocations for its officers by 50 per cent, including the Railways Minister's own fuel allowance.

Both take effect immediately. The NA measures were approved by Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq and run until further orders.

What the National Assembly notification says

Fifty per cent of Secretariat staff will attend physically, and the remaining 50 per cent will work remotely on rotational duty rosters prepared by each wing and approved by the competent authority.

Staff at home must stay reachable by telephone, email and WhatsApp, and may be told to report to the office within one hour. They keep their salary but lose diet allowance and overtime charges for those days, and they may not leave their station without permission.

The rest of the package is a standard austerity list with a fuel motive behind it:

• Fuel for official vehicles cut by 50 per cent for three months
• Complete ban on purchasing vehicles of any type
• 5 per cent cut in the Non-Employee Related Expenditure budget for all of 2026-27, applied monthly
• Meetings to be held by teleconference where possible, including Standing Committee meetings
• Ban on buying durable goods, with IT procurement exempted
• Foreign visits and travel banned for three months, with carve-outs for scholarships from international development partners, Economic Affairs Division training, and programmes under institutional agreements with the government
• Official dinners banned except for visiting foreign delegations
• Government-funded seminars, training and conferences prohibited, and where unavoidable held in government auditoriums and committee rooms
• A move to paperless working

The Secretariat said the measures were introduced in view of the prevailing global and regional situation.

What Railways cut

At the Ministry of Railways, officers' official fuel allocations were halved, and the Minister's fuel allowance was halved too.

Railways also suspended house building advance loans until 31 December 2026, so no officer or employee gets one in that window, and banned all foreign official visits by officers and employees. The orders were issued for immediate implementation of the Prime Minister's austerity measures across the department.

Why now

Read these next to the fuel numbers and they stop looking symbolic. Petrol went up Rs 4.61 on Monday night to Rs 393.75 a litre. Oil marketing companies say Rs 66.7 billion is stuck and petrol stocks are down to around 18 days. The petroleum minister has publicly warned that petrol could reach Rs 1,000 a litre if supply breaks.

Cutting government fuel consumption by half across two large departments is a supply measure as much as a savings measure, and the three-month framing matches the length of the shortage the government is planning around.

What it costs a household

The austerity cuts apply to government fuel, not yours. If you are budgeting your own, our fuel cost calculator turns a commute into a monthly rupee figure at today's Rs 393.75, and the petrol price page tracks each revision.

For NA Secretariat staff now on rotation, the arithmetic is straightforward: two office days saved a week on a 30 kilometre round trip in a car doing 12 kilometres per litre is about Rs 1,970 a week back in your pocket, set against the diet allowance and overtime you no longer draw.