Power Ministry advised not to issue false advertisements

LAHORE: The recent advertisement by Ministry of Water and Power (MoWP) on performance of power sector is a distortion of facts, Institute of Policy Reforms (IPR) said on Saturday.
According to the Institute, the power sector is in a poor state and, if anything, the performance has worsened.
It said the performance of the ministry has been witnessed during the petrol crisis in the beginning of 2015, due to problem that PSO had experienced while opening LCs for import.
“Despite a commitment to provide uninterrupted electricity during sehri and iftar in the last month of Ramadan, most areas of Pakistan remained in darkness during these hours,” it added.
There has been a de facto power crisis in Karachi in recent weeks, with many hours of unannounced load shedding daily.
The institute said this conflict between claims and perceptions needs to be resolved by the use of objective indicators.
“We first examined the performance in terms of increase in generation capacity. During 2013-14 and 2014-15 (first nine months), the Pakistan Economic Survey shows a cumulative increase in installed capacity of 792 MW,” they said.
This is equivalent to a rise of only three percent in capacity in almost two years.
“The failure is attributed to the inability of the Nandipur Project, despite massive cost overruns to generate electricity and delays in the completion of the Neelum-Jhelum project,” IPR said.
The generation of electricity has actually shown a decline of two percent in the first nine months of 2014-15.
The problem of large outstanding circular debt was largely resolved by the PML (N) government soon after it assumed office in 2013, by a massive injection of Rs 480 million into the power sector. But, it came back during the last two years.
Clearly, despite the ministry’s claims, the problem of the circular debt has persisted and grown to over Rs 300 billion.
The MoWP must realize that the poor management of the power sector is causing heavy loss to the economy. It has reduced the GDP growth rate by almost 1.5 percentage points annually. Unemployment has increased by more than 1.5 million and exports have been reduced by almost $3 billion.
Instead of issuing false advertisements, the ministry is advised to work intensively to ensure that load shedding is largely eliminated by the end of 2017, as is promised by the Prime Minister, it advised.