Textile Industry to Protest in Front of Parliament After Eid

The industrialists associated with the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (Aptma) have announced that representative bodies of millers across Pakistan will stage protest in front of the Parliament House on July 7 to denounce the “killing policies” of the government for export industries of the country.

On the same day, all textile associations will also hold a convention in Islamabad to highlight the challenges faced by the industry that have led to a fall in exports, lower utilisation of production capacity and job cuts.

“The textile industry will finalise proposals for presentation to parliament; these demands will be submitted after a token march towards the legislature,” said Aptma Punjab Chairman Syed Ali Ahsan at a press conference Tuesday.

During the day, Aptma also observed a black day and halted work in mills for two hours in protest against uneven policies and lack of electricity supply to the manufacturing units.

“The industry is already in trouble due to long delay in release of sales tax refunds by the Federal Board of Revenue and higher energy costs,” he said, adding the government, contrary to claims of no load-shedding for the industries, had been carrying out 10 hours of outages a day since the beginning of Ramazan.

Aptma members argued that it seemed that all packages announced by the prime minister and finance minister for the textile sector were only for keeping record in official books.

“They solve the problems of textile industry only in the books to please the premier and some international financial institutions, but ground realities are different, in fact the situation is worsening,” Ahsan said.

Aptma group leader Gohar Ejaz pointed out that it did not matter whether the distribution companies provided the mills with round-the-clock electricity or not.

“We are not viable in comparison to neighbouring countries as our per unit cost of electricity stands at Rs11.50 with tariff rationalisation surcharge of Rs3.63,” Ejaz said, adding the industry was enduring 10 hours of load-shedding at a time when the government was said to be adding thousands of megawatts to the national grid.

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“We call it theft surcharge collected from the sector that has zero line losses and liabilities,” he remarked.

In 2013, per unit cost of electricity was around Rs7 when international oil prices were around $100 per barrel, but today oil prices have come down to around $50, but the power cost has been jacked up to Rs11.50 per unit.