Pakistan's Loadshedding: No end to the suffering in Ramzan

There is no end to the miseries that seem to be descending upon hapless Pakistani citizens in the holy month. Not only are they observing their fasts at a time when the prices of essential food items have risen astoundingly, they have the added burden of suffering through prolonged hours of load shedding. The situation has gotten so bad that many localities are being subjected to as much as eight to 12 hours of electricity load shedding every day — and that is the urban centres; one shudders to think about the misery rural inhabitants are going through. It is being reported that the electricity shortfall has risen to a mindboggling 7,000 MW. The federal government seems dumbfounded and unable to give a solid answer to its grave failure in fixing the energy crisis. The latest statement coming out of the PML-N camp is that the national grid is ill-equipped to handle the excessive overload of electricity in these hot summer months — reaching as much as 20,000 MW — and that is why load shedding has increased.

This is a far cry from the promises we heard before Ramzan where we were ensured that iftari and sehri times would be load shedding-free. Not only are people keeping and breaking their fasts in pitch darkness, they are also suffering from the bane of voltage issues and ‘tripping’ whereby the electricity comes on for hardly a minute or two and then disappears again, with this exhausting cycle being repeated frequently, causing not just household appliances to burn out but also bring life, work and industrial production to a complete halt.

There is no way the PML-N government can pussyfoot its way around this one. After the spectre of terrorism, the energy crisis is the most devastating issue in the country, one that must be dealt with on a war footing. For all its promises, election campaign speeches and the many power projects it boasts of initiating, the woes of the masses have not been addressed — in fact, they only seem to be getting worse. Any power project that is inaugurated today will not see the ‘light’ until a good many years; till then, what are the masses supposed to do? Chief Minister Punjab Shahbaz Sharif went as far as saying that he would change his name if load shedding did not finish three months after their win in the elections. There is only so much baloney the people will swallow. If the power crisis is not addressed, the PML-N government may face the fiercest protests from the public it has ever seen.