FAISALABAD, Jan 3: Invisible hands are trying to destabilise the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government, and those involved in protests in the name of loadshedding are not sincere with the country, says a provincial minister.

At a press conference at Circuit House here on Saturday, Punjab Senior Minister Raja Riaz said though loadshedding was a serious issue these days, industrialists, labourers and traders had a consensus with the government on eight-hour loadshedding for the industry and 10-hour loadshedding for residential areas. He said the schedule had been made only for 15-days.

Riaz said people who ransacked public and private properties on Jan 1 were neither labourers nor industrialists.

“The government will deal with all unscrupulous elements with an iron hand and the damage to public and private property will not be tolerated.”

The minister said the government would announce a major dam after one month, however, he did not divulge any details about the reservoir.

He said the government had been trying to arrest the trend of power outages. He said that 60-megawatt Faisalabad thermal power station would begin work from Sunday (today).

Earlier, labourers, industrialists and traders held talks with the minister and informed him about the problems they were facing because of electricity and gas loadshedding.

Riaz said the federal minister for power had assured that there would be no unscheduled loadshedding. He said the energy crisis worsened after the closure of Mangla and Tarbela dams.