WHAT happens when a government shoves aside common sense and prudence, and makes an infrastructure project a matter of hubris?

The answer can be found in the auditor general of Pakistan’s findings on the Nandipur power project. From the very outset, once the PML-N had made clear that Nandipur would be the project on which it would demonstrate its power-sector credentials and prove it could do what the PPP utterly failed to do, it was apparent that the power project was going to be a high-risk affair.

Already a lightning rod under the PPP, Nandipur had become a symbol of government incompetence, profligacy and worse.

Know more: AGP faults Nandipur design, decisions

Despite that baggage, or perhaps because of it, PML-N policymakers decided to throw caution to the wind and make outsize promises that were going to be very hard to keep. It was like tempting fate — and the gods were unlikely to be kind.

In the end, as the AGP report has suggested, the PML-N administration has proved to be like many dispensations before it — unwilling to make reasonable pledges and unable to deliver timely and cost-efficient results.

In a way, it is almost beside the point that no gross corruption has apparently been unearthed by the AGP.

Nandipur, in part because of the elevated status the government gave it, but also because of the political opposition’s gleeful and exaggerated allegations, has at the midway point of this government become a symbol.

Electricity was the issue on which this government had staked its reputation and ability to deliver quickly and efficiently.

Two and a half years on, aside from a heavy emphasis on power generation — perhaps tellingly similar to the PPP’s approach — there has been very little by way of power-sector reforms or overhaul of the transmission and distribution systems.

Were it not for the oil prices bonanza, it is more than likely that the PML-N would be presiding over a similarly collapsing system as under the PPP.

If there is a positive to be found in the Nandipur fiasco, it is that the PML-N, at least at the prime ministerial level, remains willing to acknowledge and confront mistakes and failures. But are lessons really being learned?

If it weren’t for the allegations of corruption and the PML-N’s anxiousness to prove those allegations untrue, would there have been an audit into Nandipur? That appears to be unlikely. Which means that future bungling of projects is just as likely as before.

Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2015