THE residents of Rawalpindi-Islamabad have strongly resented the frequent unscheduled load-shedding affecting their daily life. The long duration of power outages (in some areas load-shedding is done after every hour) are not only playing havoc with the domestic users but also paralyzed commercial, economic, industrial and agricultural activities inflicting losses worth billions of rupees.
In view of the fact that the country has a surplus power generation capacity, the excessive load-shedding done by discos is not understandable and one can imagine the situation when the mercury goes further up in coming days. It is unfortunate that the power tariff in Pakistan is one of the highest in the region but the service quality is the poorest as apart from scheduled and unscheduled outages, rampant fluctuations damage electrical and electronic equipment and gadgets. Pakistan was facing a similar situation a couple of years back but credit goes to the previous government of PML(N) for prioritizing the issue and making the country surplus in power generation. Apart from other projects, those completed under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) played a pivotal role in addressing the challenge of electricity shortage. However, bad management of the power sector during the four-year rule of PTI pushed the country back to square one. There were expectations that based on its previous experience, the new government would be able to provide relief to the people but such expectations have not materialized, mainly because of surging circular debt and financial constraints of the authorities concerned. Latest reports say the country’s economy has already shrunk from 6.1% to 0.3% and the situation is unlikely to improve if the government fails to ensure interrupted supply of power to all categories of consumers.
