ISLAMABAD, Nov 24: Former minister for water and power Raja Pervez Ashraf defended rental power projects (RPPs) in the Supreme Court on Thursday, but conceded that the country’s future lay in hydel power and not in thermal.
Mr Ashraf, who is facing allegations of corruption on the RPP issue, said that unnecessary vilification had led to a perception of scam and fraud and affected the installation of power plants.
“Even harsher mudslinging and denigration was the order of the day when the government of Benazir Bhutto in 1994 introduced independent power producers (IPPs) which are now being valued,” Raja Ashraf said before a two-judge bench comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and Justice Khilji Arif Hussain.
He said big players shied away from investing in the power sector when fingers were pointed at them, charges levelled and many of them even sent to jail.
Referring to an application of Housing Minister Fasial Saleh Hayat of the PML-Q alleging corruption and mismanagement in the setting up of RPPs, Mr Ashraf said: “The concept of RPPs as a stopgap arrangement was introduced by the previous government of which Saleh Hayat was a minister and being the cabinet member he was equally responsible if a wrong policy was pursued.”
Mr Ashraf said Mr Hayat was after him because he as secretary general of the party severely criticised him when he joined the Musharraf government after winning his seat as a PPP candidate.
Not a single investor or unsuccessful bidder had ever raised an allegation of corruption against him, Mr Ashraf said and brushed aside a perception that he owned a palatial house in London.
He said the Musharraf government had paid no heed to repeated warnings of a looming power crisis and not a single megawatt of electricity had been added to the national grid during his tenure.
Mr Ashraf said the electricity shortfall which was 1,000MW in 2005 had surged to 5,000MW in 2008 when he took over as minister.
He said he had inherited a circular debt of Rs400 billion.
“We had no solution to reduce the shortfall when some fast-track projects in the pipeline got delayed for over two years.
“However, we exempted our textile industry, the main source of $35 billion foreign exchange, from loadshedding even during the difficult days,” he said.
He said the country needed to increase its power production. “Bids were invited for commissioning IPPs to mitigate the situation but no response came even for hydroelectric plants because of the law and order situation. A similar initiative by the incumbent minister met the same response,” he said.
“We are fast moving towards a different (darker) era,” he warned and said that Pakistan Electric Power Company was facing a shortfall of Rs170 billion in subsidy for providing uninterrupted supply to 6.5 million lifeline consumers out of a total 10 million.
He said the government could not afford to invest the Rs1.2 to 1.4 billion needed to generate each additional megawatt through new plants.
He said thermal power generation was too expensive and the hydel and coal assets should be exploited.
The former minister said run of the river projects had a potential of generating 7,500MW and there were 187 million tons of coal reserves in Thar. He said India faced a 40,000MW shortfall and the situation in Bangladesh was worse. Consumers inSharjah are also experiencing loadshedding and those in London pay different tariffs for different times of the day.
He said availability and affordability of power posed an uphill challenge but long-term projects could improve the situation.