I have written a number of columns mostly on Wapda and the KESC, over the past three years. Most of them critical, but they were well-intended.

One was therefore surprised when the Chairman, Wapda, instead of showing rancour, very graciously asked the scribe as a former chairman to have dinner with him in Lahore. He had decided to fete all former chairmen. Only four civilian predecessors responded.

I hardly qualified for the honour because I held the charge only for a month before the General took over complete and total control of the utility. It was a fairly well organized dinner preceded by a briefing at Wapda House.

The Chairman highlighted the difficulties encountered by him in trying to run the two utilities, Wapda and the KESC, in spite of unprecedented powers enjoyed by him. He has adopted harsh measures to instil discipline by punishing 44,000 employees out of 135,000. More than 30,000 of them were punished by being dismissed, compulsorily retired or given minor punishment. Draconian measures under 17-1A of the Wapda Act were adopted to make a mockery of the due process.

In one case he pursued an employee of grade 19 up to the Supreme Court by engaging a top-flight lawyer and yet lost. An inexpensive lawyer would have achieved as much with less than Rs1.5 million. It does not require a genius to imagine the level of morale of the employees. A very senior employee stated that the employees did not feel part of Wapda.

He banned union activities as soon as he took over. And yet he admitted to have failed in changing the culture. This was a candid and plain admission of his failure in controlling theft; improve management and bringing about a greater efficiency.

One of the problems highlighted by him are Rs24 billion outstanding against FATA. He had an innovative solution to this tricky problem. Political Agents (PAs) of the agencies in FATA should pay to Wapda for the entire electricity consumed in FATA out of millions of rupees they collect from the tribals. The PAs should become a distribution company.

Whether the billing is right is quite another matter. Line losses in FATA were negative which means it received more electricity than Wapda supplied to it. According to NEPRA, FATA has been used as a parking place for losses. Such blatant hoax, so consistently applied to the unbelieving public and credulous boss.

Complaints of over billing are endemic. Couple of years back Sindh had protested against its bills which included a small town committee billed higher than the Lahore Municipal Corporation.

The matter ended up in arbitration before a very well reputed retired Judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Mr. Shafi-ur-Rehman, Wapda plainly refused to accept the award.

Another complaint hampering his achievements is the GST. About 25 per cent of Wapda’s collection was on account of the GST. The Chairman complained that Wapda was being used as a collecting agency by the CBR and therefore it should be paid percentage for the effort.

Implicit in his argument was that GST on electricity might be waived because it unnaturally raised the tariff and brought bad name to the utility.

He also referred to lack of resources for funding 5 hydel projects, which define his Vision, 2025-a rehash of some old documents. It appears that for want of funds these projects will fall sick even before they got started. Wapda could do better by recuperating its lost production of existing hydel units. In 2002 it lost 14 per cent hydel generation over 1998.

The Wapda chief also referred to the irrigation projects including Thal Canal, Meerani Dam and Kachhi Canal. Progress on Thal Canal was satisfactory and he hastened to add that although predicated on floods the Punjab government would be well within their rights to allow its ordinary share of water to flow into it.

This raises ominous possibility because the lands commanded by Thal Canal belong to the powerful ruling elite, who would not be satisfied with any thing less than a perennial supply, floods or no floods.

That obviously would be at the cost of other farmers in or outside Punjab. To begin with, flood data were faulty and exaggerated and was intended to make the project appear viable.

On Meerani Dam, the Chairman was very optimistic and claimed that with its construction the unemployed will be eliminated (obviously not a Freudian slip but a slip of the tongue). He only meant that poverty would be eliminated. Incidentally there are reports that a luxury Lexus car has been purchased against this project of dubious value, as there is not enough water to justify it.

One must accept an absence of culture not to be able to reciprocate the good gracious hospitality of the Chairman, which must have cost Wapda a cool Rs100,000. But the need of the people to be informed weighs far more heavily than the squeamish feeling of being burdened by such cultural baggage.

One of the slides presented to the former chairmen was on revenue collected over the last five years. The figures presented were self serving (SSF) as opposed to printed statistics in Power System Statistics (PSS) as the following table would show:

Rs. b

1998 1999 2000 2001 2002

SSF 93.3 122.5 132.3 175 186.5

PSS 93.3 122.5 132.3 175 180.5

Collection is only one side of the picture. What about the expenditure? It has got out of control resulting in a gap of Rs57 billion subsidies and write-offs notwithstanding. From a profit of Rs 5 billion to the present sorry state sums up the result of his efforts. There was apparently no fudging of figures for generation.

Line losses as per SSF for the year 1998-1999 have been shown at 42 per cent against PSS figures of 25.98.

Line losses, at the time of the take over of Wapda by the present chairman have been jacked up arbitrarily to 42 per cent so as to claim credit for reduction in line losses, which never occurred. This is a mendacity at its most audacious. This he has achieved by surreptitiously adding the receivables to the line losses in the last year before he took over.

For the sake of consistency he ought to have continued this practice. But he has not, so as to appear successful in his endeavours. For 1999 the PSS figures are 27.54 per cent as against 32 per cent for SSF.For the subsequent 3 years, there is no attempt at concealing and the losses both under SSF and PSS are the same Each point of line losses reduction translates into an income of Rs2 billion. Where have Rs34 billion gone for a loss reduction of 17 points in one year? They do not appear in the books for the following years.

Number of consumers contained no concoction. In the SSF a 31 per cent increase over five years until 2002-03 (Projected) was shown over 97-98. Per annum average increase is 6 per cent. There is nothing earth -shaking about it. On the contrary the increase has been less than in the past.

SSF figures for village electrification for the first three years 97-98 to 99-2000 are the same, but for the next two years they have been tailored to suite ones taste, i.e 69,887 (68,292) and 71,567 (69,887). Village electrification slowed down considerably during the last four years to 1 to 2 per cent per annum as against 8 to 12 per cent from 1993 to 1996.

Payment to IPPs increased from Rs42.5 billion (98-99) to Rs109.2 billion (2001-02) against the unit purchased 15.3 billion kwh to 23.2 billion kWh respectively. Cost per unit kWh of electricity increased from Rs4.37 to 6.33. This is brazen baloney and nails the much-heralded claim of the Chairman that as a result of his exertions, the revised MOUs with the IPPs would yield phenomenal saving of billions of dollars. How far can one go in relying on total fabrication is amazing. And more so because they have been believed for all these years in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

One of the slides based on highly selective data from 16-5-1999 to 01-04-2003 presented a 151 per cent increase in price of fuel oil and 108 per cent in gas and therefore intended to justify minor increase in tariff of 15.5 per cent. An ordinary domestic consumer using more than 500 units a month paid 28 per cent more now than in 2000. Consumers must realize that Wapda has been over considerate not to have increased the tariff by 151 and 108 per cent. The information concealed much more than it revealed because besides the fuel oil/gas there are other elements of cost like depreciation, O&M, debt services, line losses, generation mix and quality of management.

One of the slides was on public sector receivables. FATA has been lumped with public sector although it is an area like Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan. According to the SSF, FATA receivable increased in 8 months starting 06/2002 from over Rs15.4 billion to 24 billion, 56 per cent. This huge increase does not credit to the efforts of the Chairman. Total public sector receivable over the five-year period increased from Rs24.8 billion to 33 billion.

A word of caution as far as FATA billing is concerned. To quote a previous determination from NEPRA the resulting statistics for the period 1999-2000 show an average consumption of 1704 units per month per residential consumer as compared to an average of 146 units for the whole of WAPDA. Similarly, the connected load and units billed show a load factor of more than 200 per cent which is impossible because if all the consumers use their entire connected load every hour of the day, 365 days a year, the units billed can still not reach the level of more than 100 per cent load factor. Obviously, these statistics are distorted and do not depict the true picture.

There is one hilarious piece of entry, where Defence paid Rs12.6 billion (against a bill of Rs8.971 billion) almost 50 per cent of more than was due from them. FATA recovery on the other hand was Rs1 to 2 billion as against the bill of Rs8 billion, about 12 per cent. Private receivables in 1998-1999 over 1997-1998 increased from Rs44 billion to 56 billion. All is not well with Wapda. One had a lurking suspicion that the elaborate dinner in honour of the former Chairmen had been organized to perhaps learn from their experience. This turned out to be a vain hope because the Chairman of the crumbling empire had intended the guests only to lend a polite ear to the briefing on his performance. Serious questions remain about prevarication and reckless use of hype.