LAHORE: The water and power ministry has reportedly asked its nine distribution companies to shift major burden of loadshedding from domestic consumers to the industry.

According to informed sources, all distribution companies have been asked to adjust current generation of around 14,000MW among three categories of consumers — urban, rural and industry — and to facilitate the urban consumers as much as possible.

Based on these instructions, the Lahore Electric Supply Company has prepared three different plans, an official of the operation wing of Lesco said.

According to these projections, if urban consumers take three hours loadshedding and rural feeders are shut down for six hours a day, the industry would have to face loadshedding of up to 18 hours a day.

And if urban feeders absorb four hours of outages and rural areas eight hours, industrial power suspension can come down to 16 hours.

The last projection is that if urban feeders are shut for eight hours and rural areas 10 hours, the industrial loadshedding can come down to 12 hours.

“All these projections were sent to the ministry for a decision. Preference was given to the first option. If need be the Lesco management was allowed the second option, but the third one was rejected completely,” the official said.

The current set of instructions is valid till Aug 20 after that situation will be assessed afresh.

The situation was termed beyond comprehension by Sohail Leshari, President, Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

“The government wants industry to pay taxes, achieve production and export targets, grease wheel of economic cycle and also help it achieve revenue collection, but does not want to help it when it comes to electricity distribution,” he wonders.

People might survive without power, but they can simply not without employment, he commented, adding “It may be good politics but bad economics.”

Federal Secretary for Water and Power Nargis Sethi was not available for comments.

Published in Dawn, Aug 5th, 2014