Electricity supply failing to keep up with rising demand

Faisalbad: The machine operators lean back lazily on rolls of cotton fabric, shooing flies from their sweat-soaked tunics as their boss, Abdul Latif, paces between rows of silent electric looms covered in lint.

The textile plant owner knows it's just one of several rolling blackouts that will darken his plant today, as they have every day for four years.

Along his street, other textile plants have either closed or begun selling their looms for scrap. Latif scrapes by, but the outages have cut his plant's output in half.

"The situation is very bad," Latif says. "We're losing contracts because of these outages. We can't deliver on time. If it continues like this, we may have to shut down."

Intentional

One of Pakistan's biggest scourges has nothing to do with suicide bombers or militants wielding Kalashnikov assault rifles. Because the country cannot produce the electricity needed to support a population of 177 million, the government intentionally shuts down power in staggered intervals, often for hours at a time.

The rolling blackouts are most frequent during the summer, when the whir of air conditioners in 100C plus heat boosts demand for power.

Apart from districts with top government and military offices, virtually every neighbourhood and village suffers.

The stop-gap policy prevents the country's moribund economy from getting off the ground. And as long as the economy sputters, millions of Pakistanis remain mired in poverty and joblessness, leaving the country's disaffected youth vulnerable to recruitment by Islamist militant groups.

President Asif Ali Zardari's government has given Pakistanis little reason to hope for a solution anytime soon.

This summer, government officials said that it would take at least seven years to build up the electricity generation capacity needed to eliminate the blackouts.

Various factors explain Pakistan's power woes. During General Pervez Musharraf's rule from 1999 to 2008, strong economic growth fuelled an upsurge in consumer spending that had Pakistanis flocking to stores to buy air conditioners, refrigerators and other appliances.

But Musharraf failed to pump money into boosting generation capacity to keep up with demand and the country's booming population.

Zardari inherited the massive gap between supply and demand, but his cash-strapped administration hasn't moved fast enough on hydroelectric dam projects and has yet to shore up the country's aging distribution network.

— Los Angeles Times