Pakistan government faces flak over heatwave deaths

Islamabad: The government faced an opposition backlash in the Natonal Assembly as it debated on Wednesday the energy crisis and hundreds of deaths from a severe heatwave in the country’s largest city of Karachi.

Leader of the Opposition in the lower house, Khurshid Shah, said more than 1,200 people had died over the past four days in Sindh province amid the heatwave, including over 700 in its capital, Karachi.

Shah, who belongs to Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) referred to daylong power outages, lack of water and poor health infrastrucure in Karachi, home to more than 20 million people.

“This is not a time for politics. People are dying and there is no water even to wash corpses,” Shah said in his emotional address.

Shah took strong exception to an observation made earlier by Federal Minister for Power and Water Khawaja Asif blaming the Sindh government of PPP for Karachi’s troubles.

The opposition leader proposed the the centre should take over private power company of the port city, K-Electric and said the PPP provincial government would support the move.

“This is not a K-Electric problem — this is a Pakistan problem,” the opposition leader said.

Former federal minister Naveed Qamar, also from PPP, said that the government should seriously tackle the long-running energy ciris.

Assad Omer, a leader of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) said the government has utterly failed to deliver on its promises regarding power sector reforms.

In his address earlier, the federal minister for power and water said that currently there is a gap of three thousand megawatt between deamnd and supply of electricity.

Khawaja Asif said that five-hour load shedding is being carried out in the urban areas and eight hours in rural areas.

The minister said the responsibility of providing electricity to consumers in Karachi rests with K-Electric. He said 650MW was being provided to the K-Electric keeping in view the difficulties of the people of the provincial metropolis.

He said the government has started several power projects to cope with the energy crisis.

Asif said the problem of power outages was created not by the present government but is the result of the criminal negligence of the previous governments. Temperatures in the city, which is Pakistan’s largest and has seen the majority of the deaths, were forecast to peak at 38 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit), down from the 40-plus highs of recent days.

Winds have shifted to the southwest, blowing cooler air into the port city from the Arabian Sea, and the Pakistani Met Office has predicted rain, which would bring lower temperatures.

Roads in the normally bustling city were largely deserted on Wednesday after the Sindh provincial government declared a public holiday to encourage people to stay indoors out of the sun.

A state of emergency is in force in hospitals which are struggling to cope with the thousands of people affected by heatstroke and dehydration.

The change in weather will come as welcome relief for the economic hub, where maximum temperatures have hovered around 44-45 degrees C since Saturday, though officials warned the death toll may still rise.

“The weather is getting better now and we hope that the people would bear with it now,” a senior official at the provincial health ministry said.

“The latest death toll, which we collected late last night was 750.”

The National Disaster Management Authority has been setting up dedicated heatstroke treatment centres to try to cope with the volume of patients.

Victims’ families have also faced challenges in burying their dead, as grave-diggers have struggled to keep up with demand in the scorching heat.

Blasting summer heat is not unusual in Pakistan, and some parts of the country regularly experience higher temperatures than those seen in Karachi this week, without serious loss of life.

But this year’s heatwave has coincided with the start of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, during which millions of devout Pakistanis abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset.

The majority of the deaths in Karachi have been among the poor and manual labourers who work outdoors, prompting clerics to urge those at risk of heatstroke not to fast.

Dispatch rider Danish Ali, 26, was among those to abandon his fast in the face of the killer heat.

“I started feeling sick and faint. I skipped today’s fasting and hope Allah will forgive me,” he said.

The situation has not been helped by power cuts - a regular feature of life in Pakistan - which have stopped fans and air conditioners from working.

Electricity shortages have crippled the water supply system in Karachi, hampering the pumping of millions of gallons of water to consumers, the state-run water utility said.

The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which rules Sindh, announced a protest against the K-Electric power company and the federal government.

The plan drew criticism on social media, with some people saying the PPP should devote its energy to addressing the crisis rather than politicising the issue.

The respected English-language daily Dawn accused both provincial and federal ministers of trying to pass the buck.