The representative of the textile industry estimated losses in this essential sector at 64 million euros, which represents around 60 % of the country’s exports.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
Electricity returned Tuesday, January 24 in Pakistan, the day after a gigantic breakdown which resulted in millions of euros in losses for industry. The cut started on Monday at 7:30 a.m. local time, affecting almost the whole country of 220 million inhabitants and its largest cities. The mobile telephony services have also been disrupted, tweeted the Pakistani authority for telecommunications.
Electricity returned overnight in major urban centers, including the mega -cities of Karachi and Lahore. The current was again available all over the country around 5:15 a.m. on Tuesday, announced the Minister of Energy, Khurram Dastgir Khan. The load shedding – which save the industry – will however be frequent over the next two days, the time to restart all the nuclear power plants and those in coal, he warned at a press conference in Islamabad.
“The factory must be restarted at zero”
Failure is linked to a measure to reduce costs taken in a context of an economic crisis. According to Mr. Khan, the breakdown was caused by a variation in the electrical frequency on the national network, at the restart Monday morning of the units of electricity production temporarily extinguished at night in winter to save fuel.
The secretary general of the Pakistan textile factories association, Shahid Sattar, estimated losses (64 million euros) losses in this essential sector, which represents around 60 % of Pakistani exports. Almost 90 % of the country’s textile factories had to close on Monday due to the cut, he told the France-Presse agency:
“Whenever there is a power failure, the factories must be restarted to zero, which takes a lot of time and energy. We cannot resume where we stop. All these wires who are being dyed or treated, we can no longer reuse them. This causes enormous losses. “
The Pakistani economy is already shocking in the context of rampant inflation, the free fall of the national currency – the roupie – and the low level of exchange reserves. Such an electricity cut only increases the pressure on small businesses. The country’s electrical system is a complex and fragile network, where dysfunctions can quickly multiply and power cuts are a recurring problem.
Most hospitals, industries and government institutions are equipped with rescue generators, but small businesses and households often do not have the means to get them. In Karachi, hundreds of water pumps could not work during the cut, which accentuated the difficulties of the water distribution sector, already very fragile in the largest city in Pakistan, which has 15 million of ‘inhabitants.
A similar breakdown in January 2021 had plunged most of the country into darkness, after a technical dysfunction in the south.