Powerless in the face of unemployment...

SIALKOT: Daily unscheduled power outages of about 16 to18 hours are playing havoc with the lives of people in the district. Sialkot’s export industry has been suffering huge financial losses and millions of dollars are lost on a daily basis due to the power cuts.

The power outages have also led to a remarkable decline in exports from the region.

Local traders recently told reporters that industrialists and exporters strongly protested against the daily power cuts. “This is an industrial city, how do they expect the industries to survive without electricity?” said Salman Sheikh, a local trader, adding that 70 per cent of production in the district’s factories had come to a halt due to the power crisis.

Traders said that the thousands of the daily wage industrial workers in Sialkot were being terminated from their jobs by owners, as the industries had been badly hit by perpetual power cuts in the district. They said that the18-hour long power cuts were affecting everything.

“It isn’t just the industries, although that is a major blow but our day to day lives seem to have come to a halt; businesses are suffering, shop vendors are suffering and at home there are entire days without any electricity,” said Nadir Khan, a local shop owner.

According to traders 6,000 small and large sized industrial units in export-oriented Sialkot were laying off daily wage labourers.

They said that despite repeated appeals by the Sialkot business community, there had been no let up in the on going power crisis in the district.

Later talking to the reporters at the SCCI, some traders, industrialists and exporters including Khalid Ahmed, Muhammad Aslam, Zahid Hussain Mughal, Bashir Ahmad, Muhammad Akram and Naveed Alam pointed out that the unending power outages were causing millions of

dollars of severe financial loss to the Sialkot export industries on a daily basis.

The traders said that over 350 small industrial units (most of them surgical forging units) would soon be closed by their owners in Sialkot, Uggoki, Sambrial, Daska and surrounding areas due to the ongoing power cuts. Expressing grave concern over the critical situation, main trade bodies in the district stated that export oriented industries in

Sialkot had been facing as many as 16 to 18 hours of daily power outages due to which production had been halted in several industrial hubs and SMEs were unable to adopt alternative means for acquiring electricity.

Traders have said that the crisis has reached its pinnacle as several foreign buyers have begun canceling their orders. “Foreign buyers are now diverting their business also diverting their business from

Sialkot-Pakistan to China, India, Taiwan, Thailand and other countries,” they said.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 29^th, 2010.