Month: March 2021

Most factories in Karachi and across Sindh lack basic safety equipment and protocols. In many set-ups, there are no trained personnel to deal with emergency situations. Over the years this has resulted in several lethal accidents in industrial plants. More often than not, it is an insufficient number of emergency exits and construction of industrial buildings contrary to the approved layout that worsens the impact of such incidents. Factory owners, the provincial labour department, the Sindh Building Control Authority and the federal Civil Defence Directorate have important responsibilities regarding factory…

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ISLAMABAD: The government may have to increase electricity tariff for consumers two times before December, in addition to making monthly fuel price adjustments and diverting substantial funds from taxpayers’ money to the power sector, to keep the International Monetary Fund programme going, according to sources. Background discussions with government officials suggested the exact sizes of and schedule for tariff increases and disbursement of enhanced subsidy payments would be taken up by the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the Cabinet on Wednesday. And decisions in this regard would have to be…

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KARACHI: An investment plan of approximately Rs3.7 billion has been finalised for the captive requirements of industrial zones in the city, K-Electric (KE) said on Saturday. The overall load-requirement and enhancement of captive power plants (CPPs) that will be connected to the grid is around 747 MW, spread across 743 customers, the statement said, citing surveys conducted by the utility. “More than 500 customers have already been contacted by the power utility for load requirements amounting to around 300MW. Permission for load-requirement or load-enhancement survey is awaited from around 100…

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LAHORE: Turkey and Iran have called upon Pakistan to review the tariff for Istanbul-Tehran-Islamabad (ITI) freight train on the basis of actual weight and per kilometre instead of the fixed charges for the 1,990km journey from Iran’s Zahedan city to Islamabad. In two recent coordination meetings of the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO) — held virtually on March 1 and 4 — both Turkish and Iranian authorities requested their Pakistani counterparts to introduce the per km distance charges rather than the fixed ones, which according to them, appear expensive to their…

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