Dr Ikramul Haq & Engineer Arshad H Abbasi
In 2013, Pakistan’s energy crisis reached its darkest point. Cities fell silent under endless load-shedding, factories stood shuttered, and families endured darkness for as long as 18 hours a day. This collapse was not the result of absent infrastructure but of something far more tragic: public-sector power plants, once the backbone of national energy, corroded by neglect, starved of maintenance, and left to decay. A nation of two hundred million stood at a crossroads, and the path chosen sealed a decade of suffering.
One option was straightforward: rehabilitate the thermal plants inherited under the Pakistan Electric Power Company (PEPCO). Though battered by decades of misuse, their structures remained sound. Feasibility studies laid out a rehabilitation program costing just USD 215–400 million. In return, Pakistan could have restored 1,200 MW, reduced fuel consumption, cut emissions, and bought precious time for structural reforms.
Instead, policymakers embraced imported fuels under the 2015 National Power Policy. LNG terminals rose on the coasts, coal plants in Sahiwal and Port Qasim began to burn foreign coal, and independent power producers (IPPs) signed contracts with binding take-or-pay clauses. The consequences were catastrophic. Circular debt spiralled past Rs. 5 trillion.
As a result, Pakistan’s tariffs ranked among the highest in South Asia. Ordinary households were forced to spend half their incomes on electricity. Industries shuttered, exports shrank, unemployment deepened, and every ribbon-cutting ceremony became less a promise of light than a mortgage on the nation’s sovereignty.
Across the border, India faced the same dilemma of aging coal plants and rising demand. However, in 2017, its Central Electricity Authority (CEA) launched a Renovation and Modernization (R&M) programme that identified 148 units for life extension. By 2023, over 18,000 MW had been retrofitted, with efficiency gains of nearly 10 per cent.
Flexible operations allowed integration of solar and wind. Environmental retrofits such as flue gas desulfurization (FGD) and biomass co-firing reduced emissions while providing rural incomes. Rehabilitation was cheaper, faster, and cleaner than new construction. India preserved its inheritance. Pakistan dismantled its own.
The contrast grew starker in July 2025, when Pakistan’s Power Division proudly announced the auction of 61 defunct thermal plants as scrap, earning Rs46.73 billion (USD 182 million).
Officials framed it as modernization, but in truth, it was a funeral. India modernized 18,000 MW; Pakistan sold its assets for less than the cost of a single LNG cargo. Steel that once powered cities was reduced to rubble. Turbines that could have been restored were weighed and sold. It was a nation dismantling its future while deepening its dependency on imports.
The toll has been more than financial. Families, broken by bills, sank into despair so deep that suicides over electricity bills were reported. Farmers abandoned irrigation pumps because electricity devoured their earnings. Small shopkeepers shuttered businesses they had kept alive for decades. This was not accidental mismanagement. It was structural violence — the foreseeable outcome of policies designed to extract rents for elites while imposing unbearable burdens on the powerless.
Yet, amid this despair, citizens carved their own path. By 2025, over a million homes were grid-connected, while 2.6 million rural homes relied entirely on off-grid solar. Farmers powered pumps, families cooled their homes, and shopkeepers lit their stalls through rooftop panels. In 2024 alone, Pakistan imported 17 GW of solar panels and 1.25 GWh of lithium-ion batteries — half the nation’s total installed capacity. By 2025, solar supplied a quarter of Pakistan’s electricity, a citizen-led revolution that eclipsed decades of state-led mega-projects.
The transformation has reshaped demand itself. In July 2025, peak daylight load fell by 2,000 MW compared to the previous year as citizens powered themselves. The “duck curve”, long a theoretical warning in energy reports, arrived in South Asia.
While the state stumbled, ordinary people rewired their country with bare hands and desperate ingenuity. What governments and global lenders could not deliver, citizens achieved for themselves. This was more than energy—it was dignity reclaimed, a rebellion against circular debt, IMF diktats, and elite capture.
For scholars and policymakers, Pakistan’s case will endure as a study in failure. With USD 215 million, 1,200 MW could have been restored, yet USD 70 billion was drained into debt-heavy imports. Where India modernized, Pakistan dismantled. Rehabilitation offered little space for elite rents; mega-projects overflowed with them.
Scrapping plants destroyed institutional knowledge and technical memory. Mismanagement of the power sector became the single largest driver of external dependency, as confirmed in repeated IMF reports.
The verdict is damning. A state that could not light its homes instead lit a bonfire of its sovereignty. Each dismantled turbine was a piece of independence discarded. Each inflated bill, a sentence passed upon the poor. Each decision was not just a financial error but a moral betrayal.
Today, Pakistan’s own PRIME MINISTER describes the power sector as a “global begging bowl.” The phrase captures both the depth of financial dependency and the collapse of spirit. While India squeezed efficiency from its coal fleet, Pakistan sold its steel for scrap. While others built resilience, we accumulated debt. The cost is not only measured in rupees and megawatts but in lives diminished, futures stolen, and dignity denied.
Yet, amid the ruins, the people—the forgotten majority of farmers, labourers, and families—have written their own chapter. Many of them illiterate, untrained in policy or science, nevertheless grasped what their rulers ignored: that the future lies in solar energy, in harmony with the climate, not in bondage to imported fuels. Their defiance cannot erase the grief, but it stands as a permanent rebuke to the failures of the state.
For the world, this is a warning. For Pakistanis, it is a reckoning. And for the rulers who chose spectacle and debt over dignity, it is an indictment. Power is not merely turbines and grids—it is sovereignty, survival, and the right to live in the light. To sell it for scrap, while burdening generations, was not mismanagement. It was betrayal.
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Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.
Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi, water and climate change expert, is co-founder of Energy Excellence Centres at NUST and UET Peshawar.