HYDERABAD: The Lakhra coal power plant has yet to start production even after rehabilitation of one of its three units in December last year.

The power house’s three units have installed capacity of 50MW each and one of its units caught fire on July 20 last year. At that time the unit was producing 35MW of electricity.

The plant’s second unit could also produce 35MW of electricity and both of them were run by plant authorities on a rotation basis until the July 20 incident.

After the incident, project authorities rehabilitated it and, according to plant manager Ghulam Shabbir Jatoi, the plant started production on a trial basis on July 5 this year for a couple of hours under ministerial instruction and contributed electricity to the national grid.

“Since then it has not been functioning. We need operation and maintenance budget and permission to run the plant from our ministry,” Mr Jatoi said.

He said that around 140 employees of the power house were transferred to Kotri and Jamshoro power houses to lessen the burden of its employees and budgetary expenditures. He said operation and maintenance budget required Rs200m.

Fire erupted in underground cable wire connected with pumping machine for lifting river water for the plant. The blaze soon engulfed 6kV cable in the power plant, burning almost the entire panel of wire.

The plant authorities then arranged equipment and goods locally to make the plant functional in December last year.

Chinese had established the plant in the late 1990s with an installed capacity of 150MW each for three units.

It would be pertinent to mention here that the plant was leased out to Associated Group for 20 years in 2006 by the Privatisation Commission, but the plant’s employees union, led by Mazhar Ali Mallah, had challenged the decision in the Sindh High Court and then the Supreme Court which had barred the government from privatising the coal-fired power plant while ruling in favour of the employees.

According to Mr Mallah, the high court had ordered initiation of civil and criminal proceedings against those responsible for leasing out the plant, but no action has been taken so far.

He said cheap power generation was achieved from the plant.

He said that the management and authorities were not paying serious attention to rehabilitate the power house which could contribute 150MW to the national grid.

Published in Dawn, October 4th , 2018