Between promises and hopes

Once again the government has promised to end power load-shedding in the country. Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi told a gathering at the inauguration of the country’s fifth nuclear power plant that power outages would end by the end of the current year. The power situation will improve, according to the PM, thanks to the efforts of the present PML-N government under which it is claimed that 10,000 mega watts (MW) have been added to the national grid during its tenure. Given the country’s massive shortfall in power needs some years back, this is an impressive achievement and needs to be lauded.  But unless this is followed up with a number of other measures, we will see ourselves a decade from now standing in the same situation that we were when power shortages became the norm owing to which our economy, particularly our export suffered.

Much more needs to be done to improve the power situation in the country. To begin with, more investment would now have to be made in the outdated transmission and distribution network. Line losses remain high and this has to do with poor maintenance as well as theft. Not much has been done, particularly at curbing the power theft and nabbing those responsible. Taking a page from the work done by K-Electric, a massive operation has to be conducted nationwide and heavy fines imposed. The financial viability of power distribution companies and their corporate structure also has to be re-examined. At present, most of these distribution companies are state owned and almost all are in the red. They are run in a most inefficient manner and this must be addressed possibly through the earlier plan of privatization, or some sort of management change that makes them more efficient. This is easier said than done given the numerous vested interests that are linked to milking public utilities. Finally, the issue of circular debt, which surfaces time and again in the power sector, has to be addressed. This can only happen if there is a genuine desire on the part of the government to set things right in terms of fixing local power companies and ensuring recovery of dues. Until then, adding generation capacity to the national grid will remain stop-gap arrangements.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 11^th, 2017.

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