LAHORE: The Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Tuesday rejected the Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Ltd’s (SNGPL) plan to suspend gas supply to industrial units for 12 consecutive days in July.
It urged the authorities to shelve the plan for the sake of economy that is already facing multiple challenges.
In a statement issued here, LCCI President Zafar Iqbal Chaudhry, Senior Vice President Ijaz A Mumtaz and Vice President Faisal Iqbal Sheikh said that they were unable to understand the SNGPL’s logic behind targeting the industrialists in Punjab time and again on one pretext or the other.
Supply from the Zamzama gas field was suspended on technical grounds early last week and the SNGPL asked compressed natural gas (CNG) stations to close their outlets for two days a week rather than one day per week closure being practised at present.
But after a strong reaction from the CNG station owners and the public alike, the decision was withdrawn. The SNGPL then decided to stop gas supply to the industry and announced it accordingly last week.
In their reaction, the LCCI office-bearers said that the industry in Punjab was already in dire straits due to the one day gas holiday imposed on it by the SNGPL, while there was no concept of holiday for the industrial consumers of the Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC).
They said that if the SNGPL was really facing gas shortages, it should avoid giving new gas connections and facilitate existing ones.
They said that the business community was expecting that due to the change in weather and decrease in domestic use of gas, the supply of gas to the industrial sector would improve, but unfortunately there was no improvement, adding to the miseries of the business community.
The LCCI officials said that a number of industrial units would be left with no option but to close down their operations if the gas supply situation remained the same for few more days.
They said that gas outages had been done in November because of higher demand on the domestic front but now when domestic consumption had already decreased considerably there was hardly any justification for the SNGPL to stop the supply.
They said that if the SNGPL was facing some gas shortage-related issues, it must talk to the Sui Southern Gas Company that has surplus gas or at least SNGPL should take the real stakeholders into confidence.
They said that the entire industrial sector was already passing through very critical times due to the acute shortage of electricity and bad law and order situation.
Published in the Express Tribune, June 16th, 2010.
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