Pointing fingers: Minister blames federal govt for not resolving power crisis

Murad Ali Shah claims Sindh govt has paid outstanding bills but power cuts continue

KARACHI: Having exhausted all the constitutional methods to ask the federal government to resolve the city’s power crisis, the Sindh government is left with no option but to knock on the doors of the judiciary and protest for its due rights, claimed provincial finance and energy minister Murad Ali Shah at a press conference on Tuesday.

Shah said that following predictions of energy crises in Karachi and rural Sindh, the provincial government wrote a letter to the federal government on May 13 and later held a meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and federal water and power minister Khawaja Asif to resolve the issue. “Instead of helping, however, they created hindrances,” he added.



“It was decided at the meeting that Sindh would pay the federal government the outstanding power bills of Rs2.4 billion and we did, but they made no effort to reduce the load-shedding,” he said. “We request them to cut the electricity for the Sindh government’s offices but not to punish the people of Sindh.”

The minister further alleged that the provincial government had established solar and wind energy projects but the Centre was creating hurdles in determining the electricity tariff. “Our 100MW solar plant will start producing power by September and we have inked an agreement with K-Electric to supply power to it,” he asserted. “Similarly, our 250MW wind project is in the process of generating power but the federal government is delaying the fixing of the tariff.”

Published in The Express Tribune, June 24^th, 2015.