Prime Minister Imran Khan Wednesday strongly regretted the negative impacts of the past pacts in the shape of expensive power and cumulative circular debt, and said that the energy sector in the country was facing severe crises.
Chairing a review meeting over progress in the energy sector reforms, the prime minister observed that the common man and the industrial sector had been burdened with the agreements of the past for costly power generation, while on the other hand, the circular debt kept on ballooning due to the efforts made for provision of cheap electricity. That weight was also impacting the national exchequer, he added.
During the meeting, the prime minister was given a detailed briefing on continuity of the reforms process in the energy sector and achievement of various targets within the stipulated period, PM Office Media Wing in a press release said.
The meeting was attended by Minister for Planning and Development Asad Umar, Minister for Energy Omar Ayub, Advisor on Finance Dr Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, special assistants Shahzad Qasim, Nadeem Babar and Dr Sania Nishtar, and other senior officials.
The prime minister directed that the system for provision of subsidy should be made just, fair and transparent, and special focus should be made on the system for ensuring the relief to the deserving people.
He further directed that a strategy and road-map should be formulated keeping in view various aspects, including reforms in the energy sector, power requirements and its generation, ratio in the increase and decrease during different months of the year, production cost, sale, revenue, and different rates of the electricity, and their impacts upon different sectors, so that the sector could be steered out of the crises, besides meeting the energy requirements of other sectors.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Imran Khan admitted that Pakistan’s Balochistan province has been neglected for a long time and suffers from worryingly high levels of poverty. He passed the observation while addressing the signing ceremony for the award of contracts by Universal Service Fund (USF) for the provision of voice and high speed mobile broadband data in Balochistan and Sindh.
He said that the area from where Sui gas was supplied to all over the country is itself extremely underdeveloped and is no better than one from the stone ages. “This lop-sided development has a very negative impact on society,” he said.
The premier spoke of how poor nations become poorer when all of the nation’s wealth is parked into rich countries and despite money laundering laws in place, only rich countries are protected, while the poor are not. “The result is economic migrants […] going by ship, drowning in the seas, carrying their children with them. Then these [rich countries] put up fences and walls to keep them out,” he continued.
PM Imran Khan said that the result of this kind of inequitable and unjust development is then borne by societies. Speaking of Pakistan, he highlighted how the general populace remained neglected due to the cropping up of English medium schools, who ran their affairs in a business-centric manner. “Unfortunately, the system has been such that a small section of society gets an English medium education and the rest of the society gets neglected. “The government’s Urdu medium [schools] used to produce the best intellectuals of Pakistan but then slowly English medium schools started opening up everywhere with a view for money making and government schools were left behind,” the prime minister said.
