ISLAMABAD: The Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the cabinet has expressed serious concern over fears of serious shortage of power supply and increase in loadshedding in the coming summer and faltering revenue collection of power companies.
A meeting of the ECC held on Tuesday with Finance Minister Ishaq Dar in the chair approved Rs233.5 billion for procurement of eight million tons of wheat this season. It also decided to maintain a ban on gold imports till March 31 and allow export of gemstones. Informed sources told Dawn that the Chairman of the Privatisation Commission, Mr Mohammad Zubair, informed the meeting that there were reports of up to 5,000MW of loadshedding in the country at present and that was likely to worsen in the run-up to summer.
But Finance Minister Dar said he did not expect the situation to go out of hand as the ministry of finance was releasing tariff subsidies in time and providing funds to fuel suppliers in line with budgetary allocations, but conceded there were problems in the power sector. “Recoveries have gone down and that is a matter of serious concern,” said Mr Dar.
He said that the government had previously decided to enhance power supply to the industrial sector and, as a result, industries showed better results and three to four hours of loadshedding was maintained for domestic consumers in September. About 45-50 minutes of loadshedding had since increased but unless power companies improve their collection, receivables will go up and have an adverse effect on power generation.
He said the power generation capacity had gone up by about 900MW in recent months and new power plants would come into production. He expressed the hope that the situation would not be worse than last year, but said the key to improvement was better recovery of power bills.
He directed additional secretary water and power to take up with power companies the matter of recovery and present a realistic picture about the power situation to the ECC.
WHEAT PURCHASE: The ECC approved a procurement target of eight million tons of wheat for the crop season 2013-14 by the federal and provincial governments at an estimated cost of Rs233.488 billion.
Last year, the public sector was able to procure only 5.95m tons of wheat against a target of 7.91 million tons. Low wheat procurement was due to short supply in the open market. Over the past three years, the public sector wheat procurement has on an average remained at around six tons per annum.
Under the target for current crop, Punjab will be required to purchase 4.5 million tons, followed by 1.6 million tons by Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation (Passco) and 1.3 million tons by Sindh. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan will procure 450,000 tons and 150,000 tons, respectively.
The meeting was informed that public sector wheat stocks stood at 2.468 million tons on March 3 this year, including one million ton available with Passco.
GOLD IMPORT: The meeting decided to extend the ban on import of gold till March 31. The ban was imposed in January this year to check outflow of foreign exchange and stabilise the domestic currency.
The finance minister directed the Ministry of Commerce to re-examine the issue and submit a detailed report to the ECC in its next meeting. He also directed the commerce ministry to lift restrictions on export of gemstones.
The meeting said the government had introduced several structural reforms that had started to show results in overcoming economic challenges. He said the economic growth rate was moving up, inflation was going down, foreign exchange reserves were growing, value of rupee was appreciating and the stock market was moving up.