SC moved to ensure electricity supply ‘on least cost basis’
The furore over bloated bills reached the Supreme Court on Monday with two petitioners seeking a declaration that electricity supply to citizens “on a least cost basis” is the responsibility of the federal government under Article 9 of the Constitution.
They also sought an order for the federal government to share with the apex court details of all power purchase agreements, implementation agreements and related agreements.
One petition was moved by the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry through its Vice President Zaki Aijaz and the other by Lahore High Court Bar Association President Muhammad Asad Manzoor Butt.
The petition filed by the FPCCI through advocate Feisal Hussain Naqvi also urged the court to invalidate the policies of 1994, 2002 and 2015 because they permitted and continued to permit the disposal of state largesse other than on the basis of competitive bidding and without any rational basis.
The court was asked to declare that the government and its instrumentalities cannot profit from the provision of essential facilities, such as electricity, to the general public — where such facilities were not available except from the government. The court was also urged to order the government to commission a thorough forensic audit of all independent power producers (IPPs).
The government must implement the 2020 report by recovering excess profits earned by the IPPs, renegotiating all agreements and changing them from “Take or Pay” to “Take and Pay,” read the petition.
Besides, the court should order withdrawal of directions that allow dollarisation of amounts that were not actually invested or borrowed in foreign currencies.
The petition says it is a settled law that the right to life guaranteed by Article 9 of the Constitution includes the right to electricity. Consequently, the state’s failure to provide electricity in a reasonably affordable manner amounts to an unconstitutional infringement of the right to life of citizens.
The purchase of electricity done without competitive bidding exacerbates this foundational violation of the Constitution, the petition contended, adding that for the past thirty years the electricity sector has been used for uninformed experiments in policymaking, all of which have served only to enrich domestic and international elites at the expense of Pakistan’s citizens.
The first offender, the petition says, is the World Bank, which directly benefited from the “skewed incentives” in the 1994 Policy. The irony is that even though experts and the World Bank recognised that the 1994 Policy was flawed, that same policy lives on in the form of the 2015 Policy.