ISLAMABAD: Minister for Water and Power Khawaja Asif said on Thursday that supply of 500 million cubic feet of gas per day to the CNG sector and subsidised gas to the fertiliser industry would not be allowed to continue.
Speaking at a conference on power sector reforms, he said the supply of gas to the CNG and fertiliser sectors at the existing rates were “unfair and simply unacceptable”.
The minister said the energy crisis would not end in days and months; it would take two to three years. He said the government had prepared a comprehensive plan to cope with the energy crisis. It would be announced after approval by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Mr Asif said that shortage of water was emerging as a bigger challenge than loadshedding, adding that construction of some dams had either been politicised or deferred for vested interests. He alleged that the Musharraf regime had ignored development of water storage capacity in the country.
He said that despite capital injections, the country had sustained more than Rs1 trillion losses because of power crisis over the past five years. He said loadshedding could not be ended in days or months, but promised that the situation would get better in future.
The minister said the government had decided to repair and upgrade a number of power plants currently lying non-functional or operating below capacity to improve electricity supply. The current shortfall of 4,000 to 5,000MW will soon be brought down to a reasonable level.
Mr Asif said distribution companies had been asked to strictly follow the loadshedding schedule and reduce outages with improved management of available resources. “The power shortage has become a matter of life and death for us and we will resolve it as a challenge.”
The minister said the country had been losing over Rs113 billion annually for eight years mainly because of the ‘criminal’ delay in completion of the Nandipur power project. Without naming anyone, he said Rs100 million had been taken as bribe for the project.
The purchase of expensive electricity from independent power producers kept on increasing electricity rates, he said, adding that the biggest challenge for the government was to provide electricity at affordable rates.
He said annual corruption in the power sector had reached Rs207bn which was an alarming sign for the government. He said the official figures of 22 per cent line losses were highly fudged. It has been observed that chairmen of the boards of directors of distribution companies were getting uninterrupted electricity supply for their factories.