“Pakistan is not the land of militants or extremists, it’s the land of people who work hard to earn their living.”
Benazir Bhutto,18th October on her arrival after exile
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If you have ever been to Saddar, Karachi; you are familiar with this statement. Even in countries like USA they are selling Chinese products but with a different selling moto 
In the last semester of my degree, I did a report presentation on the booming Chinese economy, the challenges that they are facing because of huge power consumption and the amount of effort the Chinese government is putting to cope these issues.
Like Pakistan the majority of the Chinese population lives in rural areas. A large amount (thousands) of workers moves out to urban China to make a decent living. This huge amount not only contributes to the growing economy but is consuming large quantity of power as well. Every year approx. 3-4 nuclear reactors are made functional but in the long run this growing amount of power houses won’t be of much help. Keeping the latter in mind Chinese Govt. have made plans to slow the number of migrating rural population and hence are making more opportunities in rural China. Similarly China is also facing environmental and other challenges which are the part and parcel of industrial growth.
Now being a Pakistani how much do we relate to the issues our neighbors are facing? For the last 8 years huge industries have been set up, every week approx. 300 or more cars join the traffic of Karachi city alone, and thousands are migrating from different parts of the country both rural and urban and joining the population of Karachi and Lahore. These people are using washing machines, iron, air conditioners, fridges, computers and TV’s. Long story sort every gadget means we require more power to run that appliance.
As the freezing winter was making history in the months of December and January 2007-8 in Pakistan, so was the record load shading and power failure/outage. The scariest question of this year will be; what we gonna do in summers? Do we have a plan? I read somewhere, that if you aren’t planning at all then you’re definitely planning to face a miserable defeat.
In eight years of this present regime we were unable to come up with any new Dam or energy resource. Reason; pathetically political and racial. Apparently nobody trusts Punjab with the Kala Bagh dam program. But then what political or religious opposition ever stopped Musharraf from doing anything. He did everything stay in power; from sacking CJ, killing thousands, vanishing hundreds, high jacking democracy, banning the media etc so what actually stopped him from making a dam in 8 years? Public interest perhaps
The mayor of Karachi Mustafa Kamal however is coming up with plan, according to which KESC will be able to produce electricity from garbage. God bless him for that, but even that program if implemented now will take another 3 years or more to be fruitful. So are we waiting for some miracle? Because things aren’t looking any good and it’s just the start of the year.
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