Dear Sir,

I was busy downloading my daily mail when I received an email from SITE Association of Industry titled LOAD SHEDDING in bold capital letters. The circular read as follows: “It is regretted to inform that due to fault on a main 220 KV linking circuit of KESC between Bin Qasim Power Station and Korangi Creek Road Grid Station, KESC had to resort to load shedding in industrial areas fed from SITE, Haroonabad, Hub Chowki, Mauripur and North Karachi grid stations at 1630 hours yesterday the 26th April 2006 as well in addition to residential load shedding. The repair work on the said circuit, as informed earlier, couldn’t be completed yesterday due to multiple theft attempts on its blue phase conductor. Due to outage of this circuit KESC is carrying out load shedding in the areas fed from this circuit. Therefore all the industrial consumers getting supply from the aforesaid grids will remain affected on Thursday, the 27th April 06 from 1630 to 2230 Hours. The inconvenience is highly regretted.”

Fabulous! Awesome! The largest industrial estate of the nation has been zapped because KESC was unable to control “multiple theft attempts”. Then just before the Zuhr prayers, my younger brother Anwer Aziz, (he looks after the fabrics division) came into my office grumbling about water scarcity. He had a tired look of frustration on his face as he had to meet the deadline for delivery of trouser fabric to a major governmental organization and he was already late due to the disturbances and holidays in the aftermath of the Nishtar Park tragedy.

These days, KESC is managed by a dedicated German who came to this metropolitan with a vision to transform this juggernaut from a termite-ridden, hopelessly corrupt entity into a vibrant, motivated, and customer-friendly organization. His honeymoon with Karachi came to an inglorious end just before the first robin of spring commenced chirping. The litmus test for him would shortly be when while reading in the morning papers or watching the scenes on the private channels that riots have taken place in Orangi and Lyari against KESC. With no support from his thousands of employees, with no one lending a sympathetic ear to him in Islamabad, and with all his foreign consultants running off to cooler lands for their holidays, the genial KESC head honcho will begin to accept the fact that LOADSHEDDING is the real terrorist and not the motley crowd that has vowed to bring their own brand of Islamic Revolution.

Water is the issue of the year. The President wants to ensure that there are dams everywhere. Right policy, albeit too late. We are still fixated on the names. Who cares if it is called Bhasa Dam or Dum Dum Diga Diga Dam. Without water, we are doomed. Ask us SITE industrialists what is the worth of water. The reason we cannot supply processed textile goods on time is because we have to wait for the water to trickle out from the water lines, or wait for the rickety vehicle steered by a half-bombed out driver representing the so-called Tanker Mafia to enter our plants’ portals leaving a trail of water from the leaking taps all over SITE, ruining our seldom repaired roads.

Last July we, the Karachi industrialists, were invited by Governor Sindh, to highlight our problems to President Musharraf. We were able to get his blessings on most of our demands that included inter alia the sanctioning of gas connections to all applications pending with SSGC. Gas supply is not our beef against SSGC bosses, who incidentally are very pro-industry and go out of their way to facilitate us. Our agitation is against the frequent and abnormal enhancements in gas rates and that too retrospectively. OGRA makes a big show of hearing out the stakeholders and then announcing pre-determined increases. The façade is perpetrated at the cost of Pakistan’s economic development.
Pakistan is on the move. There is a feeling of urgency among the industrialists that was seldom witnessed in the past. They know that they are the engine of growth and play a dominant role in achieving the export targets as well as generating meaningful employment. They know that the dice is loaded because competitors from other countries are gearing up to face the new economic world order. They know that complacency on their part would ensue into a damaging situation that would keep Pakistan’s share of the global trade pegged at a dismally low figure. They know that despondency is not the route but that only a dedicated display of optimism would lead the way so that Pakistan would be an assertive and aggressive force to reckon with in the global marketplace in the future. They do not want this caravan of industrial progress, which helped Pakistan’s GDP touch 8.4% last year and which was the source of widespread appreciation, to be stranded in the desert of infrastructure shortage.

The infrastructure deficiencies would result in a downward slide for industry putting thousands of jobs on the brink. Productivity and the efficiency of plants have become futile because external factors such as high cost and shortage of utilities escalated the cost of production. Many industries have lost the competitive edge to imported products, as the major portion of their cost is utilities. It is very much cheaper to import many of these products rather than manufacture them locally.

Industrialists cannot continue to afford to pay high tariff for utilities and maintain their position in today’s free market environment, as the cost of infrastructure for competitors in other countries is comparatively much lower. Many industrialists have been lured by the charm of investing in other countries, such as UAE, where the environment is conducive for the industrialist to invest in. If this trend continues, the nation would be the loser.

The failure to provide reliable, continuous, and low cost infrastructure has made Karachi’s industries struggle for survival and has put employment of millions in the industrial sector at stake. 40% of Pakistan’s textile processing mills are in SITE. They are the backbone of Pakistan’s textile industry that earns 67% of all export revenues. Textile processing mills are infrastructure-guzzlers, no doubt. However, without them, there would be no textile exports, no foreign exchange inflows, no employment opportunities, and no prosperity. The message to the decision-makers is very candid. Act now to blow away the dark clouds and let the sun shine in, alongwith electricity, water, and gas. My friend, the noted poet Perveen Soomro, has stated so emotionally:
Yours truly,

Majyd Aziz,
President Karachi Chambers of Commerce & Industry