FAISALABAD, Jan 15: Unbridled loadshedding has dealt a severe blow to many flourishing businesses, with some leading exporters rudely awakened to the turmoil that has deeply affected their ties with their customers, both local and foreigners.

Faisalabad’s textile industry being part of the crisis, its leading exporter Naeemul Haq is much perturbed nowadays as one of his foreign buyers, who has been doing business with him for the last well over decade, has refused to sign any deal in future because of an electricity crisis.

Hours-long power cutoffs in the district’s textile sector have resulted in 50 per cent reduction in production and rendered thousands of workers jobless. It is recently that the schedule of ‘eight-hour’ loadshedding had enabled the factories to work in two shifts of eight hours each.

Speaking to Dawn, Mr Haq said Pakistani exporters had been losing foreign buyers and that would create plethora of problems for the industrialists, the masses and even the government. “It takes years to convince and attract foreign buyers, but the ties are snapped in a moment because of any problem.”

He said foreign buyers were reluctant to place orders owing to electricity crisis in Pakistan, which had landed businessmen in trouble. “I lost one of my leading buyers who had been working with me from last 13 years.”

Frustrated over the situation, Mr Haq had announced a couple of days ago that he would immolate himself. He said he later decided to go against the extreme step on the insistence of his colleagues.

Naeemul Haq, who heads the Jaguar Hosiery, a gigantic knitwear unit in Hajiabad, had been providing jobs to nearly 2,500 skilled and unskilled labourers and fetching millions of dollars annually as foreign exchange. These days, he said, the industrialists were unable to pay salaries to labourers who had been serving them for years.

Although the government had announced schedule for power loadshedding, he said, the actual situation was different. Mr Haq is among a number of industrialists who are pleading that the government should ‘rescue’ them by ensuring facilities.

Federal minister for Textile Farooq Saeed, who had a meeting with the industrialists on Jan 4 at the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industries, came up with the typical response that the government intended to boost the sector.

Faisalabad, which is known as the textile capital of Pakistan, is home to nearly one million labourers who are directly or indirectly attached with the industry. Hundreds of labourers had time and again protested against power and gas loadshedding for they are worst hit by the multiple crises, but their efforts have not borne fruit.

Pakistan Textile Exporters Association acting chairman Rehan Nasim Bharara told Dawn that the government should immediately reduce bank markups and devise strategy for electricity production.

If the situation was not controlled immediately, he feared, things would go from bad to worse.