FAISALABAD: The textile industrialists have strongly flayed the government’s announcement of suspension of gas supply to the industries in winter season.
Pakistan Textile Exporters Association (PTEA) Chairman Sohail Pasha and Vice Chairman Rizwan Riaz Saigal, in a joint statement, said that government should shelve its gas outage plan to bring the country’s economy out of stagnation as it would not only hamper the industrial growth, but would also put jobs of millions of workers at stake, besides adversely impacting the $13 billion plus exports.
The said that gas curtailment in winters would push the textile industry to the wall that was already facing huge problems owing to the unavailability in international and local markets. Government should stop unilateral policies and decisions and take stakeholders into the loop as country, at present, is going through a very serious economic crisis in terms of escalating cost of production, they said.
Government, on one side, is contemplating to increase targets for industrial growth and on the other side its harsh decisions are posing severe threats for achieving the said target. As a result of this anti industrial act, industries in Punjab, particularly textile export industry would nose-dive. They termed energy shortage as the prime cause of economic instability and decline in industrial growth as about 50 percent production capacity of textile industry is already dysfunctional due to energy shortage.
PTEA Chairman expressed that we have never witnessed the situation in history, as energy shortfall had totally been shifted to the industry. In $13 billion plus textile exports, Punjab is the major stakeholder with $6 billion share. Pointing out the declining trend in exports, Sohail Pasha explained that country exported goods worth $3432 million in July-August period of current fiscal against exports of $3825 million in same period of outgoing fiscal showing a decline of 10.27 percent.
