- Groping in the dark
Few people seem to remember how PML-N wiped the circular debt clean with a one time, though unaudited, payment just after coming to power last time. And surely as it went about financing giant power plants the party realised additional production capacity was never really Pakistan’s problem. Our twin issues are poor transmission and non-payments; and since neither was addressed after the debt was cleared, we have come back to exactly where we were five years ago. Only this time the circular debt is even worse and chances of addressing it meaningfully even more remote.
It says something about successive governments – civilian and military alike – that the issue of rundown transmission lines has been an urgent concern since the mid-90s. Yet even as ministries sign international deals to finance one power plant after the other, nobody has yet spent even a trifle on transmission. As a result we have mega plants – whose payments will go on for years, if not decades – which regularly fail to reach optimum production, and a transmission system that is unable to take even the usual, expected summer load. And, as always, it is the common man that bears the double whammy of a hot and humid summer and more load shedding yet more loaded bills.
This is just one of the many big problems the new government will face even before it gets comfortable in office. The last one made tall promises about electricity, and only partly kept face at the huge cost of ending right where it started. Imran has made many promises as well. The new administration’s sincerity will be reflected in its actions. If it immediately turns to structural faults on the ground and makes visible efforts to unclog the circular debt, it would already be on the right track. So far, all governments have done in response to the power crisis is simply grope in the dark.
