Prime Minsiter Raja Pervaiz Ashraf increases load shedding on first day of office

Prime Minsiter Raja Pervaiz Ashraf increases load shedding on first day of office

The newly elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, did not do much to gain public favour during his first day of office as the country experienced an additional amount of load shedding that left the citizens without electricity in the sweltering
heat. The load shedding resulted after the Prime Minister of Pakistan has called a meeting on the energy crisis in the country.

He called the meeting on the directions of President Asif Ali Zardari in face of public outrage against the unprecedented load shedding across the country.

At the meeting he chaired, Raja directed the petroleum ministry to ensure daily supply of 28,000 tones oil to power plants which would help add 1,200MW to the national power grid. It was also decided to provide 15mmcfd gas to GTPS, Faisalabad, which would
add another 65MW to the system.

The participants also discussed provision of 100mmcfd additional supply of gas to Karachi Electricity Supply Corporation (KESC) to produce 300MW which would help KESC in reducing an equal off take from the national grid.

The gas is proposed to be made available to the power sector by suspending its supply of one more day in a week (66mmcfd) to the industrial and the CAPTIVE power sectors in Punjab. Similarly, 150mmcfd gas is proposed to be spared and given to the KESC by
cutting one more day’s supply to Sindh, particularly from the industrial and the CNG sectors.

In the meeting, it was also decided to constitute two committees to hold negotiations with the representative of the Punjab industry and the CNG sector to convince them to agree to cutting of another day’s gas supply to them.

It was decided that a formal meeting on the energy crisis would be convened in the coming week after the prime minister’s Sindh visit and rational and practicable strategy would be evolved to reduce the load shedding.

PPP sources said the party leadership was quite disturbed over the looming energy crisis which is earning bad name to the party. The party could not afford loosing popularity at this critical juncture when next general elections are approaching fast and
even could be held ahead of schedule, in the last quarter of this year.

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Posted by Rabiya Maqbool on Jun 24 2012. Filed under Pakistan, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry