KARACHI-Chairman of National Business Group Pakistan, President of Pakistan Businessmen and Intellectuals Forum, and All Karachi Industrial Alliance, and former provincial minister Mian Zahid Hussain has said that expensive electricity has become a problem for the people and a punishment for the industry.
Talking to business community on Friday, he said that the consumption of electricity in the public and industrial sectors was continuously decreasing but regardless of consumption, the government has to pay capacity payments to power producers, increasing the losses of this inefficient sector while reducing production.
Mian Zahid Hussain warned that if electricity rates were not reduced production, exports, employment, and income will be adversely affected.
The most important electricity sector has become a national issue due to incompetence, corruption, and failed experiments, he added.
The business leader said that losses in this sector run to trillions of rupees but were not reformed as required while the policy of continuous rate hikes was ruining the economy. He said that Pakistan has not been able to compete with its rival countries in the international market because the electricity in these countries was very cheap compared to Pakistan.
The foreign customers of Pakistani companies were not ready to bear the burden of our dysfunctional power sector, he added. Mian Zahid Hussain further said that the local industry does not have to compete in the export market, but after inflation of up to 40 percent, the people were not left with money to buy anything except food, so the industrial sector was also affected. He informed that due to the decline in local demand, the industrial sector has been forced to reduce its production, which has also drastically reduced the consumption of electricity and gas, and the entire burden of these wrong policies will be put on the people, making their condition even thinner.
Millions will be unemployed due to reduced production of industries making goods for the local and foreign markets while the losses of the power sector will continue to jump. He said that incentives should be considered so that the full capacity of power plants can be utilized which was necessary to boost the economy.
Mian Zahid Hussain said that textile exports have decreased by 6.50 percent in the first five months of this year and a further decrease was feared. In the first five months of this year, the exports of the textile group were 6.883 billion dollars, which was 7.361 billion dollars during the same five months last year. In November, textile exports decreased by 8.26 percent, which was disturbing.