THE debate, if it can be called that, surrounding the renegotiation of K-Electric’s power purchase agreement with the federal government, is getting caught in the wrong theme.

This is not about the city of Karachi versus the rest of the country. It is about how we manage the consequences of a power crisis that has everybody in its grip, and that includes the residents of Karachi.

Going by K-Electric’s own figure, 57pc of consumers in Karachi get uninterrupted electricity, but what is worth noting in this is that the remaining 43pc experience extended hours of load-shedding just like the rest of the country.

When the Sindh chief minister says that Karachi needs the electricity from the national grid just like every other city does, he is stating a simple fact.

The negotiations with K-Electric should safeguard the larger public interest where pricing and transparency are concerned, but the talks should not work towards cutting this supply off to the country’s largest city.

At a more philosophical level, it is hard to come up with an argument to not allow K-Electric to purchase electricity from the national grid.

Every distribution company in the country purchases power from the grid, and Karachi cannot be an exception without good reason. But at a purely practical level, it is true that continued purchases of power from the grid serve as a disincentive for investment in further power-generation capacity.

However, why should Karachi alone be told to invest in its own power-generation capacity? Why not make that demand of other distribution companies as well? In terms of quantity, K-Electric deals in almost exactly the same amount of electricity as Lesco, the distribution company that serves the city of Lahore and its surrounding areas.

Yet the burden of load-shedding is felt more in Lahore than in Karachi. Clearly, this is not because one city has more electricity than the other. Perhaps Karachi is better managed than Lahore. In renegotiating the agreement, the federal government is right to ensure that any undue concessions given in the past must be removed.

It is also right to underline the question of incentivising investment in the utility by the private-sector sponsors. But the city should not be spoken off as a foreign land, and the theory should not be peddled that somehow the residents of Karachi are consuming more power than everybody else in the country.

Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2015

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