No solution in sight?

The severe energy crisis has escalated from wilful destruction of public and private property to attacks against the person and assets of parliamentarians, irrespective of party affiliations, and looting. The energy shortfall is more acute in the Punjab with Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif playing the political card by expressing solidarity with the protesters, only peaceful protesters he has explicitly stated though protests are obviously no longer peaceful, while insisting that he will remain in his camp office without any air conditioning till the step motherly treatment meted out to the Punjab in terms of loadshedding ends.
The response of the federal government has been four-fold: (i) to allege that the Chief Minister Punjab is politicking on this issue whereas at this juncture he needs to support the government's efforts to reduce loadshedding and some cabinet members have threatened legal action against Sharif's support for violent protests; (ii) replaced the Sindhi Naveed Qamar with Ahmed Mukhtar as Minister for Water and Power for the purpose of appeasing the recalcitrant Punjabis with one of their own; (iii) compelled the Minister for Finance Dr Hafeez Sheikh to release some funds to ease the inter-circular debt for the very short-term thereby enabling Pakistan State Oil to pay for the necessary fuel imports for between one week to one month as well as the Minister for Petroleum and Natural Resources Dr Asim Hussain to divert gas supplied to the fertilizer industry for energy generation; and (iv) called yet another energy conference, the third one so far, where decisions taken in the past have simply not been implemented.
Ahmed Mukhtar in a press conference held the day prior to the energy conference acknowledged that Punjab's arrears were 15.6 billion rupees while Sindh's were 51 billion rupees and therefore the extent of the arrears had nothing to do with the hours of loadshedding imposed on any one province. He admitted that Punjab was facing more power outages because of the government's flawed policy and promised to rectify the situation.
Mukhtar also vowed to take on other influential defaulters which include business tycoons who are not disconnected from the grid for nonpayment of their dues unlike the poor, he accepted; and promised to meet the challenge posed by the energy crisis within the next three months. Critics of the government maintain that in three months, with the advent of the monsoons demand for electricity would abate somewhat while the rivers would hopefully overflow leading to a rise in hydel energy generation. Loadshedding hours thus would automatically decline which would have little to do with the newly appointed Water and Power Minister meeting the challenge through ushering much needed reforms in the sector.
The fact that reforms in the energy sector are crucial for short to medium term solution has been evident since the day the government took over power in 2008. The government has relied on escalating tariffs rather than on implementing reforms to meet the financial crisis of the sector or in other words the cost of electricity has been allowed to rise manifold while actual supply has declined due to the inter-circular debt accounting for higher total bills for ever declining hours of electricity supplied per day. The first Letter of Intent submitted by the government to the International Monetary Fund as a prerequisite for the approval of the 7.6 billion dollar Stand By Arrangement in 2008 committed to the elimination of tariff differential subsidies by end June 2009. In 2011-12 the budget documents reveal that subsidies under this head were in excess of 450 billion rupees (including KESC's 45 billion rupees). Pilferage, failure to compel provincial and federal government departments/ autonomous bodies and rich industrialists/agriculturists to pay their bills, and heavy taxes account for ever rising bills much to the anger of the common man without a reduction in the loadshedding hours. In short relief in the short term must entail a focus on sector reforms because without reforms the problem has only escalated with increasingly overt political implications.-A.I.