Powerless in Karachi

Every power breakdown in Karachi – and there are so many of them it can be difficult to keep count – serves as a painful reminder of the empty promises that accompanied the privatisation of K-Electric. We were told that massive investments would be made to improve the power infrastructure in the city. There were dreams of the city returning to the day when it would not only be self-sufficient in electricity but even produce a surplus. On Monday, as the city suffered its sixth major breakdown in less than a month, reality once again intruded on those dreams. This breakdown, which encompassed most of Karachi, was apparently caused by the tripping of a transmission line that is connected to the national grid. There are two related scandals here. The first is that the owners of K-Electric knew when they bought the public utility that money would need to be spent to upgrade the crumbling transmission and distribution lines. Even without the constant tripping, power losses can reach as high as 30 percent of the total produced. K-Electric has chosen to milk bill-paying customers as much as they can to make the company profitable but spent little to ensure its long-term health.

The second scandal is that we are still so heavily reliant on receiving power from the national grid. Power plants in the city are capable of producing nearly 2500 MW of power but K-Electric had preferred buying power from the national grid at subsidised rates because it would rather not incur the expense of running these plants on furnace oil or investing in new power plants. Buying electricity from the national grid costs K-Electric less than producing its own power, which is why it has come to rely on that option. The 50 MW transmission line that enveloped the city in darkness was receiving electricity from the national grid. It is time K-Electric realises that this is not a permanent solution. Power shortages in the rest of the country invariably are blamed on Karachi and K-Electric’s agreement with the centre has been under scrutiny for some time. Eventually the tap will be turned off and because of sustained mismanagement, Karachi will face even more suffering.