De-energising Power Rates
Over the past few months it has become quite apparent that Water & Power Development Authority (WAPDA) and Karachi Electric Supply Corporation Ltd. (KESC) are in a serious debt crisis. This was brought into sharp focus by the brutal murder of MD KESC Shahid Hamid several months ago by what seems clear was a professional hit team, the reason being that the late MD was delving deeper into the various irregularities that would have exposed quite a number of people. The explicit warning inherent in the gangland-type assassination was thus made quite apparent to others in similar situations. Needless to say the warning has been heeded to the detriment to the interests of the people of Pakistan even by the small dedicated band of people determined to eradicate corruption. The government has been concentrating on the Independent Power Projects (IPPs) as the major reason for the power rate crisis, that in fact was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
Let us take the straws that count and list them under two heads, viz. (1) generation and (2) distribution of electricity and then work our way back to some of the more scandalous IPPs. Whether the generation-mode is hydel or hydrocarbon, the machinery has been over-priced. While it did not make much of a difference in hydel-generated electricity, the price padding in hydrocarbon fuel – generation machinery has kept on escalating along with the price of fuel. At least 2 or 3 WAPDA chiefs made enough money to live out lives far in excess of their basic known means, to add to this the power plants are being run quite inefficiently thereby giving us unfavourable power to price ratio. With transmission losses quite high, the basic cost of bringing electricity to the doorstep of the consumer is quite high. At the consumer’s bus-bar a completely different mafia takes over, the meter readers and inspectors. The categories of consumers are (1) industrial (2) commercial (3) domestic urban (4) agriculture (5) government departments and (6) domestic rural. Without almost any exception almost all industrial and domestic consumers cheat. One simple litmus test are the ice factories where it is comparatively easy to calculate possible consumption against the product made. For the ice presently coming out of each factory, four to five times or more greater voltage has to be used. Obviously the ice factory owner would sell at a profit which means that at least 90% of the electricity is not paid for. On a lesser scale so do commercial users since it is easy to calculate the load factor because of the air conditioners and other appliances against the energy that is paid for, the same is true on a commensurately lesser scale for domestic urban users! Government departments do not cheat, they simply do not pay their bills, at least on time. The agricultural consumer not only cheat, they hardly pay their electricity bills whether it be for tubewells or domestic use. Some areas do not pay electricity bills at all e.g. the rural areas of Balochistan and the Tribal Territories, protesting vociferously any attempt to make them do so.
