By: Javed Jaleel
The new year has brought a lot to celebrate but a lot to mourn over economic decisions. However, the dropping temperature in the country has made it worse for those who are mourning economic disaster by the incumbent government. It gets even painful when you are going through a crisis and when you come home, you experience gas load-shedding. You don’t get enough of it to cook food at home, neither for school going children’s breakfast and nor for warm water to shower with. Mourning is no simple anymore. However, the ECC finally approved 25 MMCFD supply to SNGPL as the Adhi Gas Field was already supplying to SNGPL the previously existed capacity of supply. This decision was taken because of serious shortfall for domestic consumers. What is actually disturbing here that industries are also suffering outage already. Last year, we had enough gas supply for homes, our cars and industries as well. This year the shortfall costed SNGPL its board too which is yet to be dissolved legally. In a situation like this when we are aiming at curbing the imports and boosting exports, we had plans to facilitate urea producers but we were not just over billing them as per the cost needs, that they had no option but to shut the plants at once stage. And this very government decided to import 0.1 million tonnes of urea, which is an additional burden on foreign exchange and also it’s going to cost the local market jobs.
This doesn’t stop here, Punjab government is planning to import used tractors. Al-Ghazi tractors plant is on the verge of collapse. It’s a very interesting fact that Pakistan has mastered the art of tractor production and Pakistan was actually exporting these tractors. Through indigenization, the tractors produced here is assembled with over 90% locally manufactured parts. But no, government shall import tractors from abroad at the cost of its own industry. Al-Ghazi tractor is waiting for 2 billion rupees tax refund, else its gone along with a large number of employees. Millat Tractors are facing the similar hardship despite of the fact that MTL was declared Asia’s best under 200 million dollar companies.
After a lot of jibber jabber in the political scenario, we finally have a dam being built up. The contract was awarded to Prime Minister’s advisor Daood’s company DESCON, of which he is not the stakeholder at the moment as he had resigned while assuming his public office. Now this case compiles enough reasons for the PTI led government to mourn at present and people to mourn in the future because the controversy is going to cause delays. Similarly, LNG deal was condemned by PTI as the contract was awarded to a single bidder as others were disqualified. In this dam bid worth 309 billion dollars, other Joint Ventures participating in the bid were technically disqualified.
Only Descon JV with a Chinese firm was considered when its financial was opened. So, there was no lowest bidder, there was just one bidder that got approved. It has landed Razaq Daood in hot waters and PML-N along with PPP are calling authorities to probe the case. Advisor to PM neither wants to lose his seat nor his deal, so PTI is obviously in a fix. Minister for water resources Mr. Vawda is not willing to have it scrutinized because he wants the dam to happen, come what may. But some officials at the department want this to go through the scrutiny process, so there are no hiccups in future. This again is causing deadlock within the ministry.
This doesn’t end here, as the Pakistanis mourn gas shortfall, the current electricity shortfall is worsening the situation. It is amusing to find out that Pakistan has the capacity to produce around 30,000 MW of electricity but we are producing actually 9 thousand at the moment and our demand is 12 thousand megawatts. Obviously one reason is the season, but it’s embarrassing for the government to cope up with it even in winters. However, two months back Khusro Bathiyar had mentioned that PTI had shutdown all plants of energy that were being operated on imported oil. Probably he didn’t realise that there were no such reserves of petroleum items that can meet country’s demands. This is why PM and the government are eyeing at deferred payments facility from Arab countries, this is what we wish to gain from UAE’s delegation visit. The people are fed up of the mourning, government must give some relief, it’s getting out of hands now.
