Just by doing three simple things, the newly inducted Minister for Water and Power Chaudhary Ahmad Mukhtar can significantly reduce the load shedding, if he succeeds in maintaining the financial flow from the Ministry of Finance, keeping a strict check on the recovery of distribution companies and expediting the under implementation power projects.
A senior official involved in mitigation of the load shedding effort at the Ministry of Water and Power (MWP) told Pakistan Today on the condition of anonymity that there was no chance of ending the load shedding in the next three to five year period. It could be best managed in the short term by maintaining the financial flow for power generation.
As the conditions have not improved, there is no chance that subsidy will decrease this year. The government should provide funds to get full generation for restoring the economic activity; he said. The government has set a subsidy for the power sector at Rs 185 billion for the next fiscal as compared to Rs 300 billion provided this fiscal year.
This remains the major task before the new minister to convince the Finance Ministry to provide Rs 300 billion in subsidy for the next fiscal year for smooth power supply. If this amount is timely provided then there would be maximum generation and no street protests, he said adding that it would allow surpassing the GDP growth rate target next fiscal.
To improve the financial flow, MWP has stressed numerous times at source deduction of outstanding provincial and federal government dues, which have increased over Rs 215 billion. “It is a grey area which requires greatest attention of the minister”, he added.
About the poor recovery of DISCOs, he proposed that the minister should set up a dedicated team to monitor on daily basis the recovery and line losses of DISCOs. The recovery from private sector has risen to Rs 166 billion. During the last year DISCOs have not managed to achieve any recovery target and nor have they succeeded in reducing line losses. Every month they gave conflicting statistics which could not be countered checked by the ministry, due to lack of staff.
The most worrying aspect for the incumbent government is that it has not managed to add any megawatt during its tenure even though many projects were initiated. On the thermal front, 425 MW Nandipur Power Project has remained struck; the progress Tarbela extension project and on 969 MW Neelam Jhelum Power Project remains slow, PPIB has failed to kick start 1100 MW Kohala Hydropower project, conversion of Thar coal into energy still remains a pipe dream, and interest in the wind power projects seems to have gone away with the wind.
If Chaudhary Mukhtar keeps monitoring the pace of development on these projects on weekly basis, there are bright chances that most of these projects will come on line during the next few years. The cumulative impact of all these projects is around 6,000 MW and will have changing the expensive fuel mix.
addition of power producing capacity is a long term project involving more than 5 years if initiated and continued smoothly else the time gets extended. Till then power shortage has to be born.
Power is the backbone of manufacturing industries leading to growth of economy. Inadequate and erratic power supply increases the production cost and makes the product noncompetitive in export market.
Only ability to take bold decisions, which are known to most of the people knowing the business can take us out of this mess, with in a period of 6 months atleast to bring load shedding to a level that it does not hurt the economy to a great extent, until we are able to bring on line power through various projects under construction phase.
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