Change in the power ministry

Actually, he should have been eased out much earlier in view of public outcries if the government was determined enough to improve the electric supply. On the contrary, allowing only four and a half months to his successor ostensibly to effectuate a turnaround in the electricity sector from what has accumulated as four and a half years of mountainous mess, is to court a well-rounded disaster. In all that time, only 80 MW was added to the generation capacity starkly contrasting with the increase in demand at 400 MW annually.

But believe it or not, despite an expenditure of Tk 14,000 crore in the power sector in the last nearly half a decade we have almost drawn a blank in terms of new generation capacity.

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Since it's a daunting task to alleviate the horrendous mismatch between electricity supply and demand in the remainder of the government's tenure, a pragmatist is only left to draw one conclusion: the move to transfer Iqbal Hassan Mahmood out of the power ministry is a ploy to repair the political cost entailed through public outcries over frequent load-shedding.

There is absolutely no doubt that the root causes of the power sector debacle are: corruption, (what's there in it for me? syndrome), irregularities, bureaucratic red-tape, lack of vision and indecisiveness at the top levels.

Hassan Mahmood was state minister for power. The power ministry is actually in the hands of the prime minister herself, so that the responsibility for the success or failure should also lie with her office. A little more than a year ago, the state minister for power was sidelined by the PMO in the formation of a high powered committee headed by the prime minister's principal secretary to assess the power situation, do the strategic planning and formulate the short and long term plans needed to overcome power supply crunches. So, in a very structural way was the Prime Minister's Office responsible for the goings-on in the sector at the very least in a very intense way for the last one year.

Moreover, finance, planning and energy ministries are supposed to have been cooperating with the power ministry to bring about a better generation, transmission and supply of electricity. If this has not happened, then it also amounts to failure of collective responsibility which is of the essence in a cabinet system.