KARACHI: Criticising the federal government for increasing the power tariff, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz Sindh’s secretary general and former finance minister Miftah Ismail on Monday said that people will scream when the February’s electricity bill will come. He said the federal government has been robbing the people in the name of fuel adjustment charges.
He was addressing a press conference at the Muslim League House. Ismail said that Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)’s “incompetent government is not ready to accept responsibility for anything and only blames the previous government of the PML-N for their failure.” He said that frequent increases in prices of electricity and petroleum products would multiply miseries of people who were already facing hardships due to high prices of different essential commodities. The PML-N leader said that last month, the government had increased tariff by Rs1.95 per unit in a bid to implement uniform tariff across the country.
Ismail said that the incumbent government has purchased LNG at incredibly expensive prices. “If the government had purchased LNG on time, it could have saved billions of rupees,” he said. He said that the present government has no policy to deal with the energy crisis in the country and warned the people to be ready to face the worst loadshedding this summer. “The PML-N has decreased load shedding from 18 to 12 hours when it took charge of the government in 2013,” he claimed. He said that generating electricity from furnace oil and diesel is a surprising decision. “Even Japan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia do not produce diesel-powered grid power because it is expensive,” Ismail said. The price of furnace oil and diesel is three times higher than the price of LNG, he said.
