The National Assembly’s Special Committee on Energy Crises on Wednesday held the government responsible for energy crises in the country and said thousands of needless people recruited in energy providers has only put extra burden on the power sector.
The body also accepted its inability to reduce losses and other issues in the Water and Power Ministry and remained failed to complete its mandate in its tenure.
The body’s meeting held in the Parliament House in which PML-N member Shahid Khaqan Abbasi presented a sub-committee’s report that was formed under his convener ship.
In the report, the sub-committee emphasised that an integrated energy plan for Pakistan needed to be urgently developed for optimum utilisation of domestic and imported energy resources, to encourage investment in the energy sector and to establish short, medium and long term goals for power generation in the country.
It also said subsidies should be used to support development of hydro and alternative energy resources.
Abdul Qadir Khanzada said that the government had spent billions of rupees on power generation but nobody asked for outcome. He said, “Use of alternate energy resources had not seriously considered and so far we have not decided that we will use coal reserves through underground gasification or will take it out and utilise it.”
Ayatullah Durrani said that senior officers of the ministry had created several departments that resulted in unnecessary delay in work. He proposed to initiate one-window operation in the ministry to address energy shortage.
Khanzada emphasised for research in the power sector to devise strategy to deal with energy requirements in the future and to tackle it.
Officials from NEPRA said the government should decide to which sector subsidy should be given and which should be ignored. They asked for determination of cost benefit ratio on immediate basis and possible option should be considered.
They informed the legislative body that the government had paid billions of rupees in subsidy against inefficiency of the power sector.
They asked the committee to recommend that power distribution companies should be independent so that they should take their decisions independently.
Water and Power Additional Secretary Zargham Ishaq Khan told the committee that final report of worse power breakdown in the country would be submitted to the prime minister on March 15, adding that the frequency outage was the main reason behind it.
In his concluding remarks, Committee head Engineer Usman Tarakai said, “The government inherited issues like financial crises that directly impacted all sectors. However, we remained failed to address all issues. He said that government has recruited thousands of people in DISCOs and technical side remained ignored therefore generation has not improved and we are facing hours long load shedding.”
