Minister’s absence irks Senate panel

Dastgir was supposed to give briefing on illegal hiring in power companies

ISLAMABAD:

A parliamentary panel has expressed displeasure at the absence of Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir from a briefing on illegal appointments in the power-sector entities.

It was noted that the minister had failed to turn up in any of the meetings of the upper house committee in the past eight months, which annoyed its members. In Tuesday’s meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Power, its members decided to approach the Senate chairman to express their reservations about what they said was the lethargic attitude of the energy minister.

Senator Saifullah Abro chaired the Senate committee’s meeting. The energy minister skipped the huddle where he had to give a briefing on illegal appointments in the power sector.

“The energy minister is more powerful than the eight members of the committee as he doesn’t bother to attend its meeting,” remarked Chairman Saifullah Abro. He revealed that he had written a letter to the Senate to convey his reservations but it offended many people in the secretariat. “We will approach the Senate chairman to express our reservations,” he said.

K-Electric (KE) officials gave a briefing about operations of the company.

KE Chief Regulatory Officer Imran Qureshi told the committee that before privatisation KE had been incurring losses but post-privatisation it doubled the consumer base, halved the transmission and distribution losses and became a profitable company. He emphasised that all the transformation was made possible through the targeted investment made by the company’s major stakeholders.

More than $4 billion has been invested so far across the company’s value chain, which has brought “favourable outcomes”. KE’s consumer base has crossed 3.4 million.

The Senate body sought details of privatisation of the power company. “The committee should be informed about how many companies participated in bidding and what was the merit criteria,” Abro said. An investment of $700 million was made in KE after its privatisation and it made a profit of Rs474 billion in 17 years.

Privatisation Commission officials told the parliamentary panel that the main reason for the privatisation of KE was its continuous losses, which came in at Rs16.4 billion in 2001 and went up to Rs17.7 billion in 2002. In 2003, the losses crossed Rs14 billion.

The committee was told that KE’s total electricity production stood at 2,000 megawatts while it was drawing 1,000MW from the national grid. “Why load-shedding is happening, when we have electricity,” asked the committee chairman.

Responding to that, KE said that all power plants were not running due to gas load-shedding as gas pressure was not enough to feed the plants.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 21^st, 2022.

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