Pakistan and Industrial Traders Associations Front (PIAF) on Tuesday severely criticised the government's power production policy that has failed to give any relief to the trade and industry. PIAF Chairman Sohail Lashari in a statement said that energy situation was worsening with every passing day because no mega hydel power project was completed in the last over four years' tenure of the present government.
He said the situation had turned so ugly that now the electricity remained absent even on Sehar and Iftar times. He said the government should not only utilise all available resources to generate electricity but also arrange early payments to the IPPs.
He said the business community was unable to understand that why the government was not initiating coal based power projects when the country owned trillion dollar worth of coal reserves that were enough to produce 100,000 megawatts of electricity for 100 years.
The PIAF Chairman said Pakistan was the most resourceful country in the community of developing states but the electricity was the severest in comparison to other nations. Africa, Poland, India and China are producing huge quantity of electricity by coal but Pakistan despite having huge resources is producing only one percent electricity through coal means. Neither any attention was paid to the construction of new water reservoirs nor other resources including solar nor wind were tapped that resulted in a painfully slow economic growth, he added.
The PIAF Chairman said it is high time that the Federal government should initiate work on coal based power plants to get rid of the electricity shortages that had rendered hundreds of thousands of industrial workers out of jobs besides closure of numerous industrial units.
The electricity through this means would also help curtail oil import bill as at the moment a big chunk of electricity being consumed is being produced through thermal means and a huge amount of much needed foreign exchange is being spent on it. Lashari said Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf had sufficient exposure to the energy issues as he had been the Minister for water and Power for quite some time therefore he needs to focus all his energies to tap other available resources of electricity generation.