Prudent policies needed to curtail PSEs losses

LAHORE: Instead of making new promises, it is time for the ruling party to start delivering on the economic front through prudent policies that fix dysfunctional regulatory institutions and bleeding public sector companies.

Our rulers are always trying to appease the public. This country cannot prosper in this way. Untested ideas about getting rich through exploitation of natural resources like Reko Dik or offshore oil exploration are just pipe dreams. This country cannot prosper on such forlorn hopes.

The government needs planning to exploit resources. For instance, when natural gas was discovered they laid pipelines to make it available for households, but the planners failed to ensure the availability of efficient heating appliances.

To ensure efficient and sustainable use of natural gas, the need was to standardise the manufacturing of burners, room heaters, and geysers. But the government allowed manufacturers to operate as they pleased.

The efficiency of these appliances was less than 20 percent and mostly still is. In the early years, this inefficient use never bothered us because gas supplies were cheap and much more than the consumption.

Now the new gas that is explored is very expensive and is not sufficient to meet our demand. Continuing with the public appeasement mode every government gave number one preference to the domestic gas consumers while industry remains the second priority.

During winter, when gas supplies are much lower than demand, only the households are supplied gas (75-80 percent of which is wasted because of inefficient appliances). Thus, industry suffers badly.

In Bangladesh, it is the other way round. In power sector as well the first priority are the household and industry has to bear the burden of long load-shedding. The leakages in the power system have become alarmingly high.

This government claims that it has reduced circular debt from Rs36 billion a month to Rs12 billion. It may be true, but all the reduction was achieved by increasing the power tariff.

The leakages in the system continue to remain as high as ever in percentage terms. In value terms the leakages might have more than doubled because the power tariff has also doubled. High power tariff is a win-win situation for those that benefit from theft.

The PPP government during the tenure of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto nationalised so many industries to appease the masses, the consequences of which we are still facing.

Nawaz Sharif announced yellow cab scheme that might have enriched the auto makers, but its defaults made the banks suffer. He and his brother also initiated youth loan programmes –none of which addressed the employment problem.

This government announced youth loans, provision of poultry to poor families, and provision of cattle to the poor to alleviate poverty. None of these public appeasing programmes made any dent on poverty or unemployment.

However, servicing of loan remained a problem. The economy does need measures to alleviate the sufferings of masses, but more than that it needs immediate improvement in governance that could plug corrupt practices.

Every government initiative that has to be operated through bureaucracy, who is mostly corrupt to the core, would not have the desired impact on people.

In such an environment, whenever any natural resource is discovered, it would end up filling the coffers of those at the helm of affairs, while the poor would only get the ‘trickle down’ impact.

This would never reduce the burdens they face. Our masses are suffering more because of malpractices, maladministration, corruption, and nepotism, and less due to lack of resources.

Take for instance the matter of water supply in Karachi. The available water is almost enough to fulfil the genuine needs of the entire population, but the distribution is skewed that aids the corrupt to extract much higher price for water than the officially notified price.

If we look at the health facilities established by the government, we will find that there is no shortage of doctors, medicines and medical equipment, but the placement of doctors, clinics, equipment and medicines is flawed.

Doctors and equipment would not be available for general public but the VIPs are treated with best equipment by the same doctors in the same government hospital.

Similarly, there is no dearth of qualified teachers in government schools, but the problem exists in their tendency to avoid imparting knowledge or completely staying away from schools despite drawing their monthly salaries.