ISLAMABAD, Dec 30: Amid talk of a month of ‘gas emergency’ that could shut down CNG stations, the government and opposition remained far apart in the National Assembly on Friday on a possible consultative process to tackle Pakistan’s energy crisis.

On the second successive day of protests by members of the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) against severe gas shortages, the government proposed that an opposition-led committee of the house investigate the causes of the crisis or an existing house committee on energy be asked to expedite its work, promising implementation of ‘fair findings’.

“If the government does not implement them, then it can be held responsible and called inefficient,” the chief whip of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Religious Affairs Minister, Khursheed Ahmed Shah, said about the recommendations evolved through joint consultation.

But opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan seemed hardly impressed as he rejected the proposal for a new committee to be headed by an opposition member as a ‘chakar’, or dodge, that he said the government should avoid, although he made a counter-proposal that the government circulate a ‘situation draft’ explaining why the situation came to this pass so the house could discuss it at the next sitting on Monday, after a two-day weekend recess.

Mr Shah, who blamed some judicial orders for the prevailing severity of gas shortages, did not clearly promise if such a draft would be made before Monday, though he said “whatever has been said in the house will be implemented”.

He said if a 2009 court order had not stayed production of natural gas from Kunar-Basakhi reserve in Sindh – with an estimated potential of adding 300 million cubic feet per day to the national grid in 2010 – and the Supreme Court had not stayed the import of liquefied petroleum gas, “I don’t think we would have seen this difficulty”.

The opposition leader, who spoke twice on the issue in Friday’s sitting, was emphatic against sharing opposition’s wisdom with the government even before Mr Shah proposed a new committee, apparently wishing the government to do its own homework.

“If you have to depend only on opposition’s consultation, then what is the government cure for?” he asked and said: “If we have to make a decision, then you come and sit on this (opposition) side.”

But despite this hard line, Chaudhry Nisar reiterated what seems as a message he has been conveying in some of his recent speeches that his party, hit by some important recent desertions – as are the PPP and the government-allied Pakistan Muslim League-Q – to Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf, was no longer interested in early elections it has been thinking it can win.

Repeating his party’s usual charge that the government had made the present National Assembly ‘purposeless’, he said: “We want to take this assembly forward.”

And then, while asking the PPP chief whip if there would be an accountability of the government’s alleged inaction, he added: “This is the last year of this assembly.”

COMPENSATION: Earlier, the house adopted a bill already passed by the Senate to give effect to an international convention on air carriage under which airlines will be liable to pay up to Rs5 million for the death or injury to a passenger in an air crash.

The Carriage by Air Bill, which now needs a formal presidential assent to become law, gives effect in Pakistan to conventions concerning international carriage by air known as the Montreal Convention for Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air 1999, which Pakistan ratified in 2006, and, according to an accompanying “statement of objects and reasons”, to consolidate the laws and applicable international conventions in relation to international carriage by air as well as the law applicable to domestic carriage by air”.