Endless outages

Nawaz Sharif has said that loadshedding would end very soon. Since he has not given any deadline this time, could this mean that loadshedding would continue beyond 2018, as already cautioned by Nepra? Earlier, on April 30, 2014, Nawaz, speaking at the London Investment Conference, had said: “When we resumed our journey to serve the people of Pakistan in June 2013, we decided to start working on two priority areas: addressing the dire energy situation, and improving the economic outlook of the country.” On the completion of three years in office, Nawaz still has to say, repeatedly, that ‘2018 will see a loadshedding free Pakistan’, without supporting these statements with facts.

Sadly, there has not been any improvement in the energy situation, and people have to bear up to 14 hours of power outages across the country on a daily basis. There has been nominal increase in power generation capacity during this period, and currently, the electricity deficit in the national grid is in the range of 6,000-7,000MWs, depending on the severity of weather. Obviously, it seems there will be no respite for the general public from massive, persistent and prolonged loadshedding and power breakdowns in the month of Ramazan too.

Hussain Siddiqui

Islamabad