Energy crisis leaves Pakistan textiles in tatters

FAISALABAD: Spinning yarn into cloth used to be a path to fortune in Pakistan, but a story of decline encapsulates how far a crippling energy crisis and rocketing inflation are suffocating the economy.

Power cuts sometimes lasting more than 12 hours a day have forced factory owners in the country's cloth capital Faisalabad to switch off the lights and sell their looms for scrap, leaving tens of thousands of workers jobless.

The country is the world's fourth-largest producer of cloth and the industry accounts for 60 percent of export revenue according to official data. But the shortages are heaping pressure on Pakistan's crippled and debt-ridden economy.

In the three years since Pakistan returned to elected rule, the energy crisis has steadily worsened amid poor investment and rampant theft from the grid, causing daily cuts and a sharp rise in the cost of power.

"Almost 800 units of a total of around 2,000 factories in Punjab province have closed down and many more are likely to be shut," said Sheikh Abdul Qayyum, former head of the city's chamber of commerce and a factory owner. "Around 500,000 workers lost their jobs in the province -- about 100,000 in Faisalabad alone due to the closure of the factories," he said.

The country faced a total shortfall of 7,739 megawatts of electricity in the peak summer month of June, before monsoon season, while the overall shortfall in the gas supply to industry is around 400 million cubic feet per day. The authorities manage the shortages by cutting supply for hours at a time to industrial and domestic users.

Towns and cities across Pakistan are rocked by daily summer protests against the crisis and the government's perceived inaction, sometimes leading to violent clashes with riot police.

Despite a wealth of natural resources, Pakistan produces only 80 percent of its electricity needs and even some of that comes from imported fuel. "Lack of political will, bad governance and administrative inabilities pushed us into the crisis. If the situation stays the same, I have no hope things will improve," said Fazlullah Qureshi, former top bureaucrat at the country's planning commission.

The prospect of respite is so remote the Water and Power Development Authority acknowledged last week that power cuts would continue for at least another seven years.