Over 300 industrial units wind up in K-P

Poor law and order, extortion, load-shedding and embargo on gas connections impacted units

PESHAWAR: As the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government focuses its attention on establishing and developing new industrial estates in the province, the existing industries have been struggling to stay afloat.

According to calculations by of the K-P Industries Directorate, as many as 327 industrial units in the province have completely wound up their business and equipment over the past few years while 362 others have shuttered their setup.

The data, which had been shared by the K-P Industries department with the K-P assembly recently, the province has a total 2,982 registered industrial units of which 2,293 are currently running while the remaining are classified as non-functional.



In Peshawar alone, of the 854 registered industrial units, 751 are functional while 31 have wound up and 72 have closed.

Similarly, in Swabi only 163 units are running while 132 have shut down while 85 have been wound up. In Abbottabad, 13 units have closed down while 63 have wound up. In Haripur, 169 units are running out of 231, while, in Nowshera, 190 are running out of 224.

The government had constituted a committee—comprising representatives from the concerned department’s and industrialist— in March 2015, for reviving the closed or sick industrial units in the province.

The committee had been tasked to collecting data regarding these units, identifying and categorising their problems, holding negotiations between the units’ owners and with the departments with which the problems persisted and provide support for their rehabilitation.



This committee held 12 meetings and had started efforts for reviving the sick and closed units. As a result, at least 23 units located in the Hayatabad Industrial Estate of Peshawar had been revived.

Special Assistant to Chief Minister on Commerce and Industry Abdul Karim told The Express Tribune that the department had provided the list of the sick industrial units to the committee.

“We thought we would start from the Hayatabad Industrial Estate and the committee did a good job there,” Karim said, adding that the main problem which surfaced during this process was the lack of finances.

He said that both the owners and the department are short on money, which was a grave problem.

“The units were not closed during the tenure of our government,” said Karim while accusing the previous government of doing nothing to fix issues.



“We reduced the extortion issue in our tenure and we have resolved the No Objection Certificate (NOC) issue for investors. As a result, investors were showing interest in the province,” he said while citing the example of the Rashkai industrial estate where the government had received 154 applications for plots.

Haji Muhammad Afzal, the president of the K-P Chamber of Commerce and Industries, said that the governments at both federal and provincial level should help business owners in relieving them from the interests on loans which had piled up and the dues of Wapda which have stacked in fixed charges over the years.

According to Afzal, the adverse law and order situation in the province over the past decade, the trend of extortion, load-shedding and embargo on gas connections were the main reasons behind the closure of the industrial units.

“We have to keep 10 security guards for our protection when in Punjab only a single guard suffices,” he said.

“The law and order situation had limited our access to the market. Our expenditures increased and we could not compete with industrialists from other cities,” the K-PCCI president explained.

He said that the revival of sick industrial units’ would have to be a priority for the success of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Economic Zones Management Company (KPEZDMC)—a company recently established by the K-P government for industrialisation and management of economic zones in the province.

“Revival of the sick industrial units should be our prime target,” he said adding that the federal and provincial government has to work together of the revival of the industry in the province.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 1^st, 2017.