LCCI warns government of massive lay-offs, industrial closures

The Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has warned the government of massive lay-offs and industrial closures if it fails to immediately stop eight to 10 hours power outages in the industrial areas. LCCI President Irfan Qaiser Sheikh stated this in a meeting with the Trade Industrial Associations' office-bearers on Monday.
He said the government would not be able to control the situation triggered by the demonstrations and strikes called by the angry industrial workers against their retrenchments as a result of these power outages. "How the government would establish its writ and from where it would collect revenues to run its day-to-day affairs when the industrial wheel is coming to a grinding halt."
He urged the government to allocate funds in the forthcoming budget for new power projects and construction of dams to generate cheap and sufficient electricity. He said the government should understand that economic well being was a must for democracy. Unemployment, price-hike, industrial closures always give birth to lawlessness and anarchy. Therefore, the government should understand the ground realities and reset its priorities regarding provision of electricity to the industry.
Irfan Qaiser Sheikh said the industry needed a continuous supply of electricity to keep the units operational and to complete the export orders well within the given timeframe but only because of the shortage of electricity the exports were not up to the mark. He said Pakistan had already lost a number of international markets and the new longer hour power cuts would further aggravate the situation.
He said that cheaper and uninterrupted power supply was only way to achieve economic targets set for the year 2012 but neither the government was sharing its future plans to this regard nor paying any heed to the difficulties being faced by the trade and industry.
He said it was astonishing that on one hand the government circles were talking about economic stability in 2012, while on the other hand they were not sharing any kind of roadmap to achieve this goal. Irfan Qaiser Sheikh also feared a surge in street crimes, saying that law and order situation was bound to aggravate in the coming days as repeated power outages in the industrial estates was jacking up the graph of unemployment particularly hitting the daily wagers hard.
He said the most of industrial units had already reduced their working to single six-hour shift from the previous three shifts system. This had led to increased level of raw-material wastage leaving production process non-profitable. Now the leading industrial units were experiencing losses despite being managed professionally.
The crisis in industrial sector is not only causing flight of capital and relocation of industrial units to the countries like Bangladesh and Malaysia but had also reduced government revenues drastically. He said a similar situation had erupted about two years ago but that was resolved with the help of the business community who lent a lot of input in developing a viable load management plan.