News
Monday, July 04, 2011
Energy crisis leaves Pakistan textiles in tatters
FAISALABAD: Spinning yarn into cloth used to be a path to fortune in the country, 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 cloth capital of Pakistan, 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.
Malik Amanullah Mani, 31, used to be a leading light on the party circuit. As manager of his family’s textile factory, he belonged to a small, rich cabal that regularly graced private members’ clubs and dined at five-star hotels. But 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. Inflation has also hit the price of thread – leaving Mani no option but to sell most of his family’s weaving looms.
“Electricity and yarn prices have become unaffordable, and most of the times there is no power to operate our looms, so we had to sell half of them to a scrap dealer,” he said.
The former rich kid now works a loom in his father’s factory and says he gets by on a pocket money of only Rs 500 rupees a week. “In good times, I was a manager and used to distribute wages among my workers. Now I myself work on the looms we have left because I have nothing to pay the workers,” said Mani, kitted out in a black t-shirt and jeans covered in chemical marks. Faisalabad’s textile district has now become a haven for metal dealers who buy looms from closing factories and sell them as scrap.
The dealers’ warehouses are filled with broken machinery while the workers wait in weaving factories, plunged into darkness until the power resumes.
Industry leaders in Faisalabad that say the shortage of electricity and gas has forced hundreds of units to shut down, with many more in line to fall.
“Almost 800 units of a total of around 2,000 factories in Punjab have closed down and many more are likely to be shut down,” said Sheikh Abdul Qayyum, a factory owner, and former head of the city’s chamber of commerce.
“Around 500,000 have 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 7,739MW of electricity in June, before the monsoon season, while the overall shortfall of gas supply to the 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 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. afp
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk