No end to load-shedding

The whole country has been in the grip of load-shedding of electricity right since the collation government, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, took over nearly two and half months back. While there may be technical issues impeding an unrestricted supply of power to homes and businesses, the inability of the government to fuel up the various power plants due to a combined effect of costlier oil and depleting foreign exchange reserves is the main reason behind the country experiencing continued load-shedding. To add to the woes of the power-starved consumers, the electricity bills are rather rising. Well, costlier oil is bound to raise power generation cost.

The successive deadlines given by the government to rid the nation of the menace of load-shedding have come and gone, but to no avail. The situation is rather worsening by the day. Unfortunately, it appears that hope is the only government strategy to tackle the prolonged power failures across the country – the hope that the temperatures will cool down with the arrival of the monsoon season, bringing down the demand for power; and the hope that the international oil prices will ease some bit and the government will have some fiscal space to fuel up the power plants and run them on full capacity.

In the meanwhile, all consumers – domestic, commercial and industrial – have been suffering like never before. While shortage of supply to domestic consumers can only impact the government in terms of falling political capital, the day-to-day outages that the commercial and industrial consumers are suffering will also bring down the government revenues. Obviously, loss of working hours at small shops and big factories means smaller income, and thus smaller income tax. Time for the government to think out of the box for both short- and long-term solutions.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2022.

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