October 27, 2008	Monday	Shawwal 27, 1429

KARACHI, Oct 26: Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah has appealed to people not to take to the streets against enhanced power rates and prolonged outages as the government has already taken up the matter.

He told a press conference held at the Chief Minster’s House on Sunday afternoon that the tariff hike was being reviewed while people had been asked to make 60 per cent payment of their power bills in the meantime. He said agitation would not provide any solution to the power woes.

The chief minister said that the gap between demand and supply had widened over the recent years because the previous regime failed to improve the supply while encouraging investors to set up industries here. Besides, there was shortage of water in the river system, he said, adding that water was being conserved for the upcoming wheat sowing season.

He said he would discuss the issue of power outages with the federal minister for water and power in a meeting scheduled to be held within the next couple of days.

Besides, Mr Shah said, the government might get electricity from Central Asia as a party had offered to make an investment of Rs2 billion in the Port Qasim power generation system while another entrepreneur, whose firm was operating in Lakhra, had also offered to install a modern power plant with a capacity of 500 megawatts. However, he said, completion of such projects would take 16 to 18 months.

JUI delegation

Earlier, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who is chief of his own faction of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, called on the chief minister at a luncheon on Sunday.

The chief minister told journalists after the lunch that the JUI-F had always extended its cooperation to solve law and order problems in the country.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman said instead of looking towards the western powers for a solution of the prevailing crises, there was a need that all political parties made joint efforts and found a solution at the local level.