ECC meeting to be held today to decide power tariff hike

ISLAMABAD: Economic Coordination Committee(ECC) in a meeting today (Monday) expected to give go ahead for electricity tariff hike.

The ECC meeting will be chaired by Finance Minister, Asad Umar, which is expected to give approval to surge electricity tariff up to  2.20 rupees per unit.

It was learnt that expected tariff hike will generate Rs200billion for government’s kitty annually.

It is prime condition of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to hike electricity tariff, in order to get new program from it.

In last ECC meeting held on October 16, decision of hike in electricity tariff was deferred until the next session of the committee (which is going to be held today).

Finance Minister Asad Umer chaired the meeting to mull over the increase in electricity price and decided to deliberate on the difficult decision in the upcoming meeting of the ECC.

Moreover, the government consented the provision of LNG to industries during the session.

The federal government also directed the authorities to ensure uninterrupted supply of gas to the export sector throughout the winters.

Previously, the Economic Coordination Committee had approved the hike in gas tariff while reducing the import tax on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) to ten per cent.

In the line of the decision taken by the committee, the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) later notified the public of an increase in gas tariff up to 143 percent, effective from September 27.

According to OGRA’s notification, gas price for CNG sector was increased by 40 percent.

For power generation companies, the gas price was hiked by 57 percent, while for the rest of the industries it went up by 40 per cent.

For fertiliser companies, gas prices soared by 40 to 50 percent.

Petroleum Minister Chaudhry Ghulam Sarwar justified the rise in gas price and said the government had divided consumers into three categories and domestic consumers will not be hit hard by the hike in gas tariff.

“The consumers were previously divided into three slabs i.e lower middle class, middle class, upper class and there was no pricing distinction; now we have just increased the price for middle and lower middle class’ by 15 to 20 percent which means if they paid 252 rupees in past, now they will pay Rs275 only,” said the minister.

On October 02, ECC met with Finance Minister, Asad Umar in the chair.

The consideration of proposal regarding tariff rationalization for power sector was deferred on the request from the finance and power divisions who asked for further time to deliberate the proposed revisions.