HOW normal is it for the national grid to experience a breakdown so immense that the country’s largest city, along with several other smaller cities and large swathes of rural areas, are plunged into darkness for almost eight hours? This is what we just witnessed in Sindh and Balochistan and it is something which occurs with distressing regularity in many parts of the country. In May, a similar power breakdown triggered by a fault in a switchyard at the Guddu thermal power station led to another large swathe plunging into darkness for a prolonged period, this time in Punjab. In both cases, it was the transmission grid that was at fault.

These incidents happen every year. An inquiry is ordered, a report is produced, cosmetic action is taken and the matter is forgotten and buried. All this shows that the staff in the power bureaucracy has no concept whatsoever of the importance of their job, and the scale of their responsibilities. They are merely killing time, and appear far more focused on internal rivalries and perks instead of the service that they are required to perform. Such power outages that impact the lives of tens of millions of people in the country are proof that the growth and evolution of the power system has moved beyond the capacity of the government bureaucracy to manage, calling into question the latter’s ability to carry out its responsibilities in the future. The new government should make it a priority to ensure that power-sector reforms are carried out to gradually minimise the role of the government bureaucracy in the future running of the sector. The blueprint for how this ought to be done was drawn up a long time ago. It includes bringing in outside management into the distribution companies, changing their boards, and moving towards market pricing for power. Without such measures, the power system will continue to degenerate, giving us more spells of large-scale breakdowns and a skyrocketing circular debt. It is time to change.

Published in Dawn, August 19th, 2018