President Multan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI) Malik Asrar Ahmed Awan in a press statement has expressed concern over long duration of loadshedding, which has adversely affected the industry. He said that the residents of Multan were experiencing unscheduled loadshedding of 8 to 12 hours a day and there was power outage after every one or two hours.
He said that the Wapda authorities announced a schedule of load shedding according to which there was a loadshedding of 6 hours in urban areas and 10 hours in rural areas. Unfortunately, the schedule was not being observed and it appears as if the urban areas of Multan city had been awarded the status of rural area by the Wapda authorities for the purpose of loadshedding, which is very unfortunate.
The president emphasised that long hours of unscheduled loadshedding have disrupted the whole business due to which the export orders were being cancelled thereby resulting in trade disputes and huge financial loss to the exporters of Multan, which is also a huge national loss.
The President MCCI requested Wapda authorities for curtailment of loadshedding hours and strict compliance of announced schedule to avoid negative impact on the export sector. The MCCI president said before taking such decisions, government should always take all stakeholders, including businessmen into confidence, so that mutually agreeable solutions could be worked out to protect the supreme national interests of the country.
The businessmen strongly condemned the decision of National Electric Power Regulatory Authority to increase power tariff by 64 paisa per unit from July 1 and demanded of the government to withdraw it in order to save businessmen and general public from further troubles.