Pakistan Economy Watch (PEW) on Wednesday said the Energy Conference was a step initiated by the government to stop long march planned by frustrated masses and dismayed business community of Punjab. The decisions taken to conserve electricity were nothing but a repetition of the past mistakes which will never help anyone gain anything, it said.
It is amazing that conference focused on energy conservation while power production took secondary position, said PEW President Dr Murtaza Mughal. He said there was no resolution on Kalabagh dam which indicated lack of interest on the part of federal and provincial governments in resolving power issue on sustainable basis.
Dr Murtaza Mughal said that oil producing countries would also close markets by sunset but traders in an energy starved country would never agree to such steps. "I doubt the ability of the incompetent and weak government to impose the decision on markets," he said.
He questioned that why government continued to blame Musharraf for not adding a single megawatt to the national grid while pushing rental power projects and ignoring positive steps to overcome energy shortages. "How can masses trust and cooperate with government that claims to have added 3400 MW in the power grid while ground realities are otherwise," he said.
Dr Murtaza Mughal said Pakistan was the only country in the world where claims of the government, prices of energy and duration of outages were increasing simultaneously. Similarly, it was only possible in the current democratic set up that a Finance Minister claimed that ratio of debt to GDP had been decreased which was negation of SBP, Finance Ministry, ADB, IMF and World Bank reports, he added. He said that masses would never cooperate with the incredible government unless they saw them sacrificing some luxuries.-PR