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| Jang Economic Session |
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Govt held responsible for gas crisis
Sunday, November 15, 2009
News Desk
RAWALPINDI: No gas crisis exists in the country, which is simply a creation of the federal government.
Why does Sui Southern Gas Pipelines Limited (SSGPL), which has surplus production, not sharing the shortfall with the SNGPL to overcome the crisis like the Pepco, which has been providing electricity to the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) to meet the shortfall?
A judicious gas distribution system has to be followed in the country like the judicious taxation system. Instead of supplying natural gas to certain blue-eyed units of the textile sector, problems faced by hundreds of thousands of poor and middle class CNG operators should be resolved. The government is understood to have decided to put a ban on CNG supplies at a time when almost 40 per cent transport plying on roads had been converted to it.
The CNG system, on the whole, has fallen sick and it is therefore obligatory to resort to its loadshedding, not just resorting to load management. A number of inter-provincial problems have been cropping up because of non-judicious supply of gas, which is bound to leave wrong perceptions on the economic and political fronts.
Giving these views, participants at the Jang Economic Session on the topic “Ban on CNG, Facts and Issues” invited the attention of the Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and said ban on CNG would affect investments worth over one trillion rupees and also render hundreds of thousands of persons jobless.
The session, hosted by Sikandar Hamid Lodhi, was attended by Vice Chairman All Pakistan CNG Association Raja Shuja Anwar, Chairman Chief Minister’s Task Force for Essential Items S A Hamid, an economist Dr Qais Aslam, former chairman All Pakistan CNG Association Sana-ur-Rahman, Member All Pakistan CNG Association Shehzad Azam Khan and a consumer Muhammad Haroon Khan.
Giving statistics about the business, Raja Shuja Anwar said that there were about 3,500 CNG stations in the country with over 2.5 million consumers.
He questioned as to how the government could ignore this sector and exert pressure on it on one pretext or the other. To avoid any sense of deprivation from any province, it is necessary that the government should take up the distribution system judiciously, he said adding CNG was environment friendly and curbs on it shall lead to pollution, escalation of prices and unemployment.
S A Hamid was of the view that curbs on CNG were the manifestation of incompetence of the federal government and the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority. He invited the Competition Commission to play its role to help overcome the situation. He warned that the petroleum import bill would swell by $3 billion.
Dr Qais Aslam, taking part in the session, said the government neither had any energy policy nor industrial policy and as a result the economy had gone to dogs. He asked for evolving a policy for proper utilisation of the available resources and stop wastage of natural resources.
Offering his views, Sana-ur-Rahman said he had no objections if uninterrupted gas supply was ensured for the textile processing units. He suggested that CNG supplies to the gas deficit areas might be discontinued.
Shahzad Alam Khan pointed out that the gas crisis had developed because the government had never conducted any survey in this regard. It had no facts and figures and simply hit and try methodology was resorted to. He said major investments in the CNG sector had come from minor entrepreneurs and many of them were based on bank loans.
He failed to understand as to why the government was planning to introduce CNG buses when such a grave gas crisis existed. He pleaded for uniform power loadshedding across the country.
Mohammad Haroon Khan, referring to some estimates, disclosed that three fourth of the total transport had already been converted to CNG on government incentives.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
