Govt pledges to overhaul power sector 'in days'

ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Water and Power Syed Naveed Qamar gave an assurance in the National Assembly on Monday that the government is going to overhaul whole of the power sector with the dissolution of PEPCO in the next 15-20 days.

Meanwhile, the lawmakers in the Lower House of Parliament were in unison over the need to set up a 'special parliamentary committee' to examine the factors responsible for power crisis. The idea for the parliamentary committee, mandated to submit its proposals to the government before the next session on November 14, was floated by Sardar Mehtab Abbassi of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz.

The water and power minister suggested to the Speaker that "a cut-off date be given to the proposed committee for completion of its tasks." He recounted the government's achievement, saying "The day debate on power crisis started in the House, the gap between demand and supply was 7000MW and everybody was rightly up in arms since life across the country was disrupted. But today, there are hardly any outages in the country."

In addition to the reduced fuel supply to power producers, he said several other factors were responsible for the power crisis, which include two nuclear power plants going offline (one scheduled and other unscheduled), shortage of oil and gas, flow of money for supply of oil. "The shortage of fuel to power producers alone cannot be held responsible for the crisis," he added.

While concluding the ongoing debate over the power crisis in the country, Qamar identified "lack of governance between the distribution companies as core issue in the power crisis." "We are going to change the whole system in power sector and in this respect PEPCO is going to be dissolved within next 10-15 days," the minister said.

President Asif Ali Zardari, on Monday, while emplacing on the need to solve the energy crisis on a permanent basis, said the power situation must be improved and should not be allowed to degenerate into an issue of power politics.

The president was speaking during a meeting of senior leadership of PPP at the Presidency, which took stock of the overall political situation in the country with emphasis on availability of power, economic and law and order situation and relations with coalition partners.

The situation in Balochistan also came under discussion. Water and Power Syed Naveed Qamar briefed the meeting on power supply and demand situation.