In his budget speech last week, Finance Minister Miftah Ismail touted the major reduction in loadshedding as one of the biggest achievements of the PML-N government. He may have spoken too soon. As temperatures approached 50 degrees Celsius in parts of the country on Tuesday, there were major breakdowns that point to a long summer ahead. The electricity shortfall is believed to be as high as 8000 MW. With Ramazan now approaching, government promises of continuous electricity supply during the holy month cannot be taken at face value. The energy ministry has blamed the outages on the unavailability of power plants but the problem likely goes deeper than that. Even though the government has heavily invested in new power generation projects, largely thanks to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, it has made the overhaul of our crumbling power infrastructure less of a priority. As a consequence, distribution and transmission are unacceptably high and by some measures 20 percent of Pakistan’s total electricity production ends up being wasted. Until we take a long-term approach to our power crisis and the government prioritises improvements in infrastructure, we will always be susceptible to prolonged power cuts. The reason no government has been willing to take this step is because the project will be a long-term one and any benefits will not be seen by voters until long after a government’s tenure is over. This is why they prefer embarking on new projects, where they can point to quicker results, even though this does little to alleviate the larger problem.
Over the next few weeks, an additional problem faced by the government is the low supply of furnace oil. In January, the government had banned the import of furnace oil to improve the country’s balance of payments deficit. Now, with four of our nuclear plants non-operational, the government has directed PSO to immediately float a tender to order furnace oil. However, even a quick improvement in power production is unlikely to bring about an end to loadshedding. On top of that, the circular debt crisis in the power sector is as bad as ever. It took the direct intervention of the federal government to order Sui Southern Gas to provide the agreed supply of gas to K-Electric after a dispute over dues; that same problem afflicts every link in the power supply chain. Five years ago, soon after assuming power, the government had made a big show of paying off the entire circular debt. Since then it has taken no other action to prevent a recurrence of the problem. Now that it is ending its tenure, the government will just pass on this seemingly never-ending power crisis to its successor.