FAISALABAD, Pakistan — Spinning yarn into cloth used to be a path to
fortune in Pakistan, but a story of decline encapsulates how far a
crippling energy crisis and rocketing inflation are suffocating the
economy.
Power cuts sometimes lasting more than 12 hours a day
have forced factory owners in the country's cloth capital Faisalabad to
switch off the lights and sell their looms for scrap, leaving tens of
thousands of workers jobless.
The country is the world's
fourth-largest producer of cloth and the industry accounts for 60
percent of export revenue according to official data. But the shortages
are heaping pressure on Pakistan's crippled and debt-ridden economy.
Malik
Ammanullah Mani, 31, used to be a leading light on the party circuit.
As manager of his family's textile factory, he belonged to a small,
rich cabal that regularly graced private members' clubs and dined at
five-star hotels.
But in the three years since Pakistan returned
to elected rule, the energy crisis has steadily worsened amid poor
investment and rampant theft from the grid, causing daily cuts and a
sharp rise in the cost of power.
Inflation has also hit the price of thread -- leaving Mani no option but to sell most of his family's weaving looms.
"Electricity
and yarn prices have become unaffordable, for most of the time there is
no power to run our looms, so we had to sell half of them to a scrap
dealer," Mani told AFP as other workers sat idle in his closed factory.
The former rich kid now works a loom in his father's factory and says he gets by on pocket money of just 500 rupees ($6) a week.
"In
good times, I was manager and distributing wages among my workers. Now
I myself work on the looms we have left because I have nothing to pay
workers," said Mani, kitted out in a black t-shirt and jeans covered in
chemical marks.
Faisalabad's textile district has now become a
haven for metal dealers who buy looms from closing factories and sell
them as scrap.
Those dealers' warehouses are filled with broken
machinery while workers wait idle in weaving factories, plunged into
darkness until the power resumes.
Industry leaders in Faisalabad,
which is situated in Pakistan's most populous province of Punjab, say
the shortage of electricity and gas has forced hundreds of units to
shut down, with unknown numbers more in line to fall.
"Almost 800
units of a total of around 2,000 factories in Punjab province have
closed down and many more are likely to be shut," said Sheikh Abdul
Qayyum, former head of the city's chamber of commerce and a factory
owner.
"Around 500,000 workers lost their jobs in the province --
about 100,000 in Faisalabad alone due to the closure of the factories,"
he said.
The country faced a total shortfall of 7,739 megawatts
of electricity in the peak summer month of June, before monsoon season,
while the overall shortfall in the gas supply to industry is around 400
million cubic feet per day.
The authorities manage the shortages by cutting supply for hours at a time to industrial and domestic users.
Towns
and cities across Pakistan are rocked by daily summer protests against
the crisis and the government's perceived inaction, sometimes leading
to violent clashes with riot police.
Despite a wealth of natural
resources, Pakistan produces only 80 percent of its electricity needs
and even some of that comes from imported fuel.
"Lack of
political will, bad governance and administrative inabilities pushed us
into the crisis. If the situation stays the same, I have no hope things
will improve," said Fazlullah Qureshi, former top bureaucrat at the
country's planning commission.
Punjab's industrialists blame
politicians for exacerbating the crisis, accusing the government of
giving preferential treatment to the textile industry in southern
province of Sindh, the home of President Asif Ali Zardari.
A
constitutional clause approved by parliament last year gives each
province first right to use the natural resources they produce, putting
Sindh ahead of Punjab in the queue for gas, which in turns fuels
electricity generation.
"We want a uniform policy in the country
as everybody should share the burden and opportunities," said Shabbir
Ahmed, a senior member of Faisalabad's chamber of commerce.
But
the prospect of respite is so remote the Water and Power Development
Authority acknowledged last week that power cuts would continue for at
least another seven years. AFP
