ISLAMABAD, Sept 2: Amid growing gap between demand and supply of electricity, President Asif Ali Zardari is expected to chair a meeting in Karachi on Monday (today) during which the concerned functionaries of federal government and Sindh will attempt to formulate a financing plan aimed to keep loadshedding within reasonable limits in the period leading up to general election.

Sources told Dawn on Sunday the ministries of water and power, petroleum and natural resources and finance had been engaged in hectic consultations over the last several days to finalise a five-month financing plan for the energy sector. However, there was no agreement on the size of the proposed plan, with the finance ministry insisting that it could not “go beyond the resources allocated in the budget”.

In view of the difficulties being faced by the three ministries in agreeing to a ‘prudent plan’, President Zardari held preliminary consultations with ministers for water and power and finance, prime minister’s adviser on petroleum and chairman of Wapda in Karachi on Sunday, said the sources.

The consultations would continue on Monday with senior officials of the three ministries, representatives of power companies and Sindh chief minister and his team joining the deliberations.

The sources said the Sindh government functionaries and officials of Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) had a crucial role to play in efforts to ease the electricity crisis because together they owed more than Rs120 billion to power companies.

“Unless the Sindh government and KESC cooperate, the crisis cannot be eased,” an official remarked.

A spokesman for the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) confirmed that as of August 30, the KESC alone owed about Rs70 billion to the power companies.

He said that since September 2008 the KESC purchased electricity worth Rs177 billion and paid Rs122 billion, leaving Rs55 billion in unpaid bills. Adding to this amount Rs15.5 billion on account of mark-up on delayed payments took the receivables from the KESC to over Rs70 billion.

The spokesman said the KESC had not made any payment in the current fiscal year.

Meanwhile, the gap between demand and supply of electricity, which ranged between 2,800MW and 3,700MW for almost two months, went beyond the 4,200MW mark at the weekend. This was largely because the PSO’s receivables from the power sector exceeded Rs220 billion and it failed to maintain a supply of up to 25,000 tons of fuel per day.

The sources said the finance ministry wanted to contain annual injections into the power sector from the budget to below Rs134 billion against last year’s Rs420 billion that led to a record 8.5 per cent fiscal deficit for the year.

But the finance ministry is reported to have doled out about Rs65 billion to the power sector in just the first two months of the current fiscal year.

The situation at the PSO, said the sources, was so bad that it had to import two ships full of furnace oil from a friendly source in the Middle East on the personal guarantee of a top government functionary. “That’s clearly not the way to run a country,” said an official.

Last week the ministries of finance, water and power and petroleum and natural resources began considering a comprehensive plan to limit loadshedding to between four and six hours per day. However, the plan has yet to be approved by the finance ministry because of ‘unsustainably high requirement’ from the budget, according to an official.