ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly was informed on Monday that the national grid would receive not a single watt of electricity from the 969MW Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project until late 2016.

The government had earlier expected to make one of its units operational by the middle of the current year.

However, in a written reply, Minister for Water and Power Khwaja Mohammad Asif assured the house that the government was working to increase power supply in the coming summer.

Also read: Neelum-Jhelum project may be further delayed, faces Rs50bn shortage

In response to a supplementary question, Minister of State for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali informed the assembly that the national grid would receive an additional 2,000MW by May this year.

But former minister for water and power Naveed Qamar of the PPP rejected the claim and said documents showed that the PML-N government had failed to add even a single unit to the national grid in two years of its rule.

The ministers failed to counter Mr Qamar’s claim with facts and started criticising the previous PPP government for not doing enough to improve the country’s power infrastructure.

The house was informed that PC-1 of the Neelum Jhelum project of 500MW had been approved in December 1989 to be completed by June 1998 at a cost of Rs15 billion. But work on the project could not be started because of non-availability of local and foreign financing and non-release of funds.

The first revised PC-1 for 969MW was approved in February 2002 for the project to be completed by 2007 at a cost of Rs84.502bn. But after the arrangement of financing, the project could only be started in January 2008 with completion date of October 2015.

As per amended schedule incorporated in the second revised PC-1, Ecnec approved the project in July 2013 to be completed by the end of 2016 at a cost of Rs274.882bn.

Published in Dawn March 17th , 2015

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