To say Pakistan's power crisis is worsening on a daily basis is to say the least.
With an electricity shortfall that is spiraling out of control and unannounced
power cuts of up to 12 hours in many areas of the country, the government of
Pakistan is trying to figure out how to pull the plug on Pakistan's energy
crisis. Unfortunately for them, it will take more than a bit of effort.
The problem with Pakistan's energy crisis is bad planning.
Electricity consumption has increased over the years, but successive
governments failed to plan for the future. As a result, Pakistan now needs a
huge supply of electricity, and has very few power generation plants that can
cope up with the demand. The current government has announced
plans to set up power plants and build dams to help generate power, but
building power plants afresh takes a lot of time -- and a lot of money, which
this cash-strapped government will not be able to pay for on its own.
This
afternoon, the Karachi Electric Supply Company, which supplies power to Pakistan's financial hub Karachi,
cut off Jinnah Postgraduate
Medical Center's
electricity supply. The Jinnah Hospital, as it is popularly known, is one of
the largest public hospitals in the city, and caters to thousands of patients
on a daily basis. KESC said it disconnected the electricity because the
hospital owed millions of rupees in unpaid bills. On the other hand, the
hospital's administration said it had asked the Pakistani government for funds
so they could pay the bills and would do so within two to three weeks. Yet KESC
cut off the supply, affecting the lives of thousands of patients. The
hospital's backup generator could only provide electricity to a few wards. It
is a miracle that no one died. After repeated assurances regarding the bill
payment, the electricity supply was
restored after two and a half hours, yet there was every possible chance
that a patient could've died in the ER, the operating room, or the ICU.
On a
personal note, at my home in Karachi
I don't have electricity for up to four hours a day, every day. Imagine coming
home in the blazing heat to realize there's no respite from the sun: the house
is as hot as an oven, you can't work, finish household chores, watch TV or for
that matter even get a glass of cold water.
The
situation is even worse in Punjab: hundreds of
factories have been forced to close down, and protestors take to the streets
almost daily to raise their voices against the situation, but to no avail.
In
the midst of the outages, provinces and cities trade allegations on the
distribution of power resources, power companies (both state-run and private)
accuse the other of not paying bills or blame consumers for stealing
electricity and not paying bills, government institutions rack up millions in
unpaid bills, and protests against the current status quo continue.
Over
the past two days, Prime Minister Gilani has been consulting with the Chief
Ministers of all provinces, trying
to find a way that they can reduce the electricity demand. The finalized
proposal includes reducing the workweek to five days from six, ensuring markets
are closed by evening and having weddings end by midnight. While these
conditions may temporarily help ease the crisis, Pakistan needs power to
survive. It's a thought that the U.S.
administration has tried to help address. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton announced
on a visit to Pakistan
that the country would receive $125 million for electricity infrastructure. Washington's envoy to
the region, Richard Holbrooke, has raised the issue several times, even giving
a collection of fiction containing a short story about an electrician to President Obama to read.
Riots
sparked across
Pakistan last summer over the electricity crisis a situation that took days
to quell.
The
government must implement not just the power-saving proposals but also look
towards building power plants and tapping into alternative energy resources. If
politicians do not take heed, the government will soon be forced to realize
that more than the Taliban, more than suicide bombings, more than insurgencies,
it is really the power crisis -- the product of years of bad planning at all
levels of government -- that most threatens Pakistan's present and future.
Huma Imtiaz works as a journalist in Pakistan.
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