Major IT Projects in Pakistan Public Sector

[Riaz Haq]

IT projects ranging from automated meter reading and computerized land records management to online education and mobile banking are now at various stages of implementation across Pakistan.  In a report released today, the World Bank calls these projects "unprecedented in the public sector in developing countries". The objective of these efforts is to reduce corruption, increase productivity and improve service delivery in both private and public sectors. Here's a brief description of five key areas where information technology penetration is visible:

1. Automated Meter Reading:

Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) project has been rolled out across the country with the help of United States Agency for International Development (USAID).  It is aimed at reducing power theft which accounts for 20-30% of all power generated in Pakistan. It will provide accurate electronic meter readings with little human intervention, using technology to transmit meter readings data via GSM/GPRS and Radio Frequency. It is expected to help power distribution companies (DISCOs) to monitor electricity consumption trends for different consumer categories, understand demand patterns, reduce electricity losses significantly and increase their revenues. Initial AMR pilots indicate significant reduction of power theft in Lahore.

In addition to automatic reading of consumer meters, smart meters have been installed with the support of USAID on incoming and outgoing feeders at all nine government-owned electric utilities. These will help move toward building of a smart national grid to better manage power generation, transmission and distribution in the country.

2. Mobile Governance:

The Punjab government is deploying smartphone applications to crack down on absentee mobile government workers and their corrupt practices. As part of this project, the government employee must send his or her picture and a report of interaction with citizens along with GPS coordinates. For example, a agricultural pest control official required to visit farmers must file reports of his findings and actions in real time via a smartphone app.

An agricultural field monitor uploads a picture of himself and spotted pests on crops using a smartphone. This data is used to ensure visits happen and create easily-accessible time and spatial data. Source: World Bank

An SMS soliciting feedback from citizens is sent out after each such visit or interaction. Responses from users are logged into a central database, and the data then analyzed and mapped. Call centers have also been trained to contact those who do not respond or are unable to read the text due to illiteracy.More than three million users of public services have so far been contacted since the summer of 2012, with both positive and negative feedback, according to the World Bank report. “Sir, we went to the hospital yesterday. They asked for 1500 rupees [in bribes]. We didn’t have the money so we left,” reads one of the reports about a hospital in Lahore, the provincial capital. The feedback is actively monitored by the office the Chief Secretary – the top civil servant in the province – to manage the performance of officials.

Results of Google-sponsored Survey in Pakistan Source: Express Tribune

3. Computerized Land Records:

Provincial land departments in Pakistan regularly show up as the most corrupt in Transparency International surveys conducted every year. In fact, most Pakistanis refer to the culture of corruption in Pakistan as "patwari culture". For the uninitiated, a patwari is a low level official in the land department responsible for keeping land title records. Corrupt patwaris either deliberately misplace such records or delay issuing land title papers when citizens refuse to pay bribes.  With digitization of such records, citizens will be able to check and confirm titles to lands on a computer screen by entering  their computerized national identity card (CNIC) number. Corrupt patwaris are trying to undermine the computerization project.

4. Education and Training:

Pakistan has been at the forefront of using information technology to increase literacy and offer higher education. A pilot program in the country has demonstrated the effectiveness of pushing mass literacy through the use of cell phone text messaging capability.

A UNESCO has recently also started a post-literacy project in Pakistan based on mobile technology. The Mobile Based Post Literacy program is targeted at young rural women, aged between 15 and 25, by keeping them interested in literacy through the mobile phone.

The concept of virtual instruction is finding its way to K-12 education as well. Increasing number of Pakistanis are drawn to various online sites. Silicon Valley NEDians have launched Learntive, an effort to offer digitized lessons in high-school courses.  Virtual Education for All is a local Pakistani initiative extending the concept to primary level.

Virtual University(VU) and Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) offer distance learning programs using information technology. Pakistan's Virtual University (VU) has won the Outstanding New Site Award 2012 for an Open CourseWare website which was created in 2011.

5. Mobile Banking:

Combination of growth of mobile phones and ease of mobile money transfers have enabled many Pakistanis to have access to financial services for the first time in their lives.

In a country where only 22% of the population owns bank accounts and more than 70% owns mobile phones, mobile banking is proving to be the fastest way to promote financial inclusion considered by experts to be essential to lift people out of poverty. Benefits include easy access for rural customers to banking services through agents in villages without bank branches, better documentation of the economy, enlarging of the tax-base and efficiency of economic transactions.

Summary: 

Increasing use of computers and mobile phones is enabling broad adoption of information technology in Pakistan. It has the potential to increase transparency, enhance individual productivity and improve standards of living of ordinary citizens.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Mobile Internet to Overtake Desktop in 2014 in Pakistan

Biometric Information Technology in Pakistan

Power Theft in Pakistan

Mobile Banking in Pakistan

Mass Literacy Through Mobile Phones

Online Education in Pakistan

Pakistan's Telecom Revolution

[Farhan Khan]

Obviously Sir, they are better than Sindh, Balochistan and KPK governments but one more problem with Punjab government is that it is doing very little to solve the problem of small farmers.....Still today, large tracts of fertile land are owned by big land-lords on whom the government is also dependent for support.....Worse is the situation in Sindh...So, land reforms are needed before computerizing land records....

[Riaz Haq]

Here's an excerpt of a NY Times Op Ed on Punjab, Pakistan:

Concerns about Punjabi domination have soared since the spring of 2013, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, of the Pakistan Muslim League (P.M.L.N.), was returned to power for the third time. He belongs to a Lahore-based industrial family with close ties to Punjab’s business elite and a can-do attitude to governance that features flashy development schemes. The perception that Punjab is batting in a league of its own has mounted under the Sharifs. During the general election campaign last year, while the Pakistan People’s Party, which is perceived to represent Sindhi interests, was making welfare cash transfers to impoverished women, the P.M.L.N. was distributing laptops to students.

Most of Karachi’s 18 million residents have to rely on private transport. But Lahoris commute on a rapid metrobus system, and a similar initiative in Islamabad will be the federal capital’s most expensive road project to date. While the Punjabi government is digitizing land records, automating administrative transactions and promoting what it calls e-governance, the Sindh government faces a famine in Tharparkar.

Punjab has been able to progress because it has been relatively unimpeded by terrorism. Shahbaz Sharif, Nawaz’s brother and Punjab’s chief minister since 2008, publicly appealed to the Pakistani Taliban in 2010 not to attack the province, and the request was largely heeded. His P.M.L.N. government in Punjab has not clamped down on influential sectarian militant groups in the province, instead befriending their leaders to rally votes during elections.

Likewise, the P.M.L.N. government at the center started pushing for peace talks with the Taliban in September and then even more in November, when the Taliban threatened to carry out attacks in Punjab to avenge the killing of their former leader in a U.S. drone strike in North Waziristan. The central government is considering concessions, including swapping prisoners, granting an amnesty to Taliban fighters and even giving the group a political role in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the border with Afghanistan.

Government officials have repeatedly stated that a peace deal is necessary because military strikes against the Taliban would lead to reprisal attacks. Given the carnage that Karachi, Quetta and Peshawar have endured in recent years, many Pakistanis describe that policy as a ploy to sacrifice the tribal areas in order to save Lahore. Such perceptions only heighten interprovincial tensions, just at a time when the country needs to be more united than ever.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/opinion/the-other-threat-to-pakis...

[Riaz Haq]

NDTV: What India Can Learn About E-Governance From Pakistan

Pakistan, like India, suffers from a litany of problems such as frequent power outages, limited unreliable broadband connectivity and a lack of computer literacy. And like India, Pakistan is also experiencing the transformative effects of the smartphone revolution.

But while the government here is now talking about using apps like WhatsApp for citizen complaints, our neighbour has been using government-made smartphone apps to help officials deal with a range of issues from fighting dengue to extending arable land to crime monitoring.

A lot of the credit to this change can be given to the Punjab Information and Technology Board (PITB), headed by the Chairman Dr Umar Saif since 2011. Saif - who received his PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge - also serves as the Vice Chancellor of the Information Technology University in Pakistan, after a four year stint teaching and working at MIT.

The Pakistani province of Punjab holds more than half of the country's population and in 2011 it was facing a dengue epidemic, with 21,000 cases and hundreds of fatalities. Part of the problem was the haphazard of digitisation of records, which made it hard to co-ordinate work across departments. The solution that the PITB came up with was to create a smartphone application that could be distributed to workers and officials in the various government departments engaged in tackling dengue. The app was used to track the work being done to fight the disease, and to also map the spread of dengue.

Speaking to NDTV Gagdets on the phone, Saif shares his insights into the challenges of bringing a technology solution to a government problem.

"Historically, IT departments around the world have stuck to using personal computers as the platform for their solutions," Saif explains, "and this has some fundamental flaws. Governments spend billions buying the hardware and software, but the uptake of technology is very low."

"The bureaucracy - particularly the lower tiers, are not computer savvy, and PCs have a lot of infrastructural needs," he adds. "And a senior bureaucrat will often not want to use the computer either, and just gives it to an assistant in a back room. That's the state of things in Pakistan, and I suspect, in countries like India too - such devices are used more as typewriters."

To work around these constraints, the PITB invested in Android smartphones - cheaper ones for the lower level staff, and high-end ones for the senior officials - and distributed these devices with a few work-related pre-installed apps along with some paid for talk time and messages.

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/features/what-india-can-learn-about...

[Riaz Haq]

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Power Distribution Programme has successfully implemented its Load Data Improvement (LDI) Program in DISCOs, aimed at minimising unscheduled load shedding.
Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) devices were installed on a fast-track basis in all DISCOs including Fesco. The project also included the upgrade of each DISCOs Power Distribution Centre (PDC) and accordingly Fesco’s PDC was upgraded and made functional, with live data now being acquired from all of its grid stations and outgoing feeders.
Currently, under the USAIDs LDI programme, the Fesco PDC has fitted multiple screens displaying live load data by grid substation and feeders. Power factor information is also displayed indicating when capacitor banks should be deployed to improve the voltage level. To date, a total of 1,064 AMR meters have been installed on 85 grid stations of Fesco that are reporting live load data information to perform effective load management and curtailing unscheduled load-shedding.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/750950/usaid-to-help-strengthen-country...

[Riaz Haq]

Zong will invest $1 billion in the next three to four years to deploy network for Next Generation Technologies including 3G/4G in maximum cities of the country in line with it business plans and continuity of the long-term friendship between China and Pakistan.
This was stated by Fan Yunjun, CEO Zong while official launch of 4G technology in Karachi with the roll out of new service in seven different cities of the country . The company plans are aggressive for 3G, 4G and even 2G and it will add 4,000 new high-tech sites by the end of 2014.
Zong is the first network of 4G technology that will bring the country a pride as Pakistan will become first in the index of highest broadband service from 93rd position from the present. It even left China in the race which is stand at 4th position on the scorecard.
Chinese operator is providing 3G service with a broadband speed of 42 Mbps and 4G LTE with 150 Mbps.
Zong is the biggest cellular operator in terms of 3G technology user base with nearly 866,000, Yunjun claimed. Zong is the choice of 47 percent of the subscribers using 3G technology among different operators who are also providing same service in the country, he claimed quoting an independent third party research.
He said the availability of the low cost smartphone is hampering the growth of 3G and 4G technologies but the company is working with different handset manufacturers to introduce those gadgets which could be affordable to maximum people in the country.
Zong is working to develop an ecosystem which helps promoting technology and its impacts on the lives and business of the people, hence different new ventures will be taking place within different companies to introduce various apps to subscribers in future.
Yunjun added that Zong 4G enabled SIM is highly secure, speedy and data capacity of 46KB whereas facilitating customers, a handset M811 handset is the first step to provide the customers with a complete bouquet of hardware and service provision.
Chinese operator is the fastest growing network in terms of subscribers as it acquired more than 50 percent connections among the overall base in the past three years reaching the overall numbers at 27.2 million at present.
The combination of 3G/4G technology along with 2G will add more number of customers in the future though Next Generation Technologies are made available in 19 cities.
The 4G technology is being launch in seven cities including federal and provincial capitals Faisalabad, Rawalpindi whereas it is already providing services of 3G in cities including Sargodha, Sukkur, Abbotabad, Gujrawala, Gujrat, Maradan, Chasma and Motorway

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/business/28-Sep-2014/zong-to-invest-1-...

[Riaz Haq]

As Pakistan’s business community becomes more adapt with cloud technology and seeks more cloud-based solutions for growth, Microsoft is expanding its operations in the country in a bid to increase its enterprise customer base.
“Our initial focus in Pakistan was primarily on the corporate sector. However, as the cloud computing segment in Pakistan is now growing rapidly, we are expanding our operations in Pakistan, with a new strategy of Cloud first – Mobile first,” company’s Cloud and Enterprise Business Group Lead Stephane Consalvi said in an interview with The Express Tribune.
The regional head of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise business for North Africa East Mediterranean and Pakistan, Consalvi has been visiting different cities of Pakistan to explain and market the company’s latest product, Azure, to enterprise customers.
Azure is a collection of integrated computing services for storage, data, networking and an application that helps the enterprises move faster, do more and save money, said Consalvi. “It is a Platform-As-A-Service. So basically, it means that you can build any piece of hardware by providing system and employment on demand, without waiting for any hardware to be shipped.”
Explaining their new strategy, Consalvi said, “We are now a device and services company. We are building services in the cloud, and you will be able to consume these services with whatever kind of device you are using.”
Technology is evolving so rapidly that new versions of products replace older ones in a matter of months, something that might not bode well with the country’s businessmen, usually slow in technology adoption. To this, the Frenchman said Pakistanis are embracing latest technologies in the same way as people in developed markets.
“I don’t think that in Pakistan you should underestimate your technological acumen.” He, however, added that everyone has a different pace towards adopting technology. “Even in Europe, common people are not on top of every breakthrough,” he said.
“We would love to have bigger operations and events in Pakistan with more resources deployed in the country.” Referring to a conference in Karachi, he said he received some intelligent and interesting questions. “This means that the level of the maturity of the market is pretty good.”
Consalvi said he did not see any difference between Pakistan and the much advanced European countries in terms of technology adoption and demand for cloud services. “I have been to Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad and seen many customers who are very tech-savvy and advanced like those in developed countries,” he said. They want to take advantage of the latest innovations and remain well integrated with the global line of modern business applications, simply to ease business, he said.
Summarising his observation of the Pakistani market, the Frenchman said, “I can see tremendous opportunities in Pakistan. The new generation of young and talented developers has given us the opportunity to work more actively with the local market. I think, in a span of two to three years, this market will evolve and grow dramatically.”

http://tribune.com.pk/story/781407/cloud-based-solutions-microsoft-...

[Riaz Haq]

Pakistan has launched a state-of-the-art system to help farmers calculate their crop losses to extreme weather more accurately and support the government in tackling hunger and malnutrition.

Late last month, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) installed the geospatial crop forecasting system at the Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) to improve the quality of agricultural statistics.

Muhammad Bashir, a 45-year-old farmer in the Narowal district of Punjab province, lost 12 acres (4.9 hectares) of his rice crop when it was washed away by flash floods in September.

"Erratic weather and flash floods hit our crops each year but there is no mechanism in place to get early warning and ascertain the exact loss," said Bashir, who owns 73 acres (29.5 hectares) of land.

Growers in flood-prone areas cannot earn enough to cover their outgoings because of regular disasters, and most even fail to repay bank loans due to crop damage, he said by telephone.

"If we get data on our crop yields and weather conditions well in advance, we can prepare a good budget for educating our children," he said. The government should introduce modern technology for the farming business, he suggested.

Pakistan's agriculture sector contributes a fifth of gross domestic product and generates work for just under half the country's labour force, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2013-14.

The recent floods damaged standing crops on 978,363 hectares (2.4 million acres) while estimates by government ministries and experts put losses to the economy at $14-15 million.

CHEAPER, BETTER DATA

Faisal Syed, project facilitator at the FAO, said the new geospatial system would help both the government and farmers get accurate and timely data on crop yields and expected losses in the case of natural disasters like floods and droughts.

Under the system, funded by the U.S. government, SUPARCO uses Satellite Remote Sensing (SRS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies to gather crop data.

Satellite imagery is taken twice a year, while field surveys are conducted during two cropping seasons in spring and autumn. SUPARCO then uses statistical models to estimate yields.

"The geospatial system will replace the archaic manual method of crop forecasting and help decrease costs of data collection," said Syed.

The system will initially cover only two provinces of Pakistan: Punjab and Sindh.

Floods wash away standing crops on millions of hectares each year in Pakistan, but the government has always lacked precise data on the damage to crops and yields, Syed added.

"A government cannot formulate cogent policies to address the issues of food security and malnutrition in the affected areas if it doesn't have proper data," he said.

---------

Ibrahim Mughal, chairman of Agri Forum Pakistan, a body representing Pakistani farmers, said the federal and provincial governments set unrealistic targets for crop production each year so as to paint a positive picture of agriculture - which ultimately hurts the interests of growers.

The Crop Reporting Services department should be independent so it can adopt the geospatial system and relay accurate information to farmers free from government influence, he said.

"As long as the officers remain under pressure from the government, they cannot make public real data on the targets set for a crop and the expected yield," he said.

Political will should be focused rather on dealing with food security, malnutrition and erratic weather impacts, he said.

Mughal suggested the Punjab and Sindh governments should send crop data and weather forecasts to farmers each week via mobile phone to maximise the impact of the new system.

http://www.trust.org/item/20141128083628-mk8y3/?source=fiInDepth

[Riaz Haq]

Shahid Abdullah has been in business long enough to spot a good opportunity. Abdullah is the president of the Sapphire Group, one of Pakistan’s largest textile companies with 16,000 employees, $800 million in annual revenues, and a global base of customers. But when his country started running out of electricity a decade ago, he switched gears and built a large power plant in Muridke, just north of Pakistan’s second largest city Lahore. “Moving into power generation was a step that made sense,” he says. “Not just from a business perspective, but also in terms of realizing our mission and contributing to the development of the communities in which we work and live.”

Abdullah’s calculation was simple. Lack of power is one of Pakistan’s burning needs. Electricity consumption is growing by close to 8 percent, and peak power demand exceeds supply by more than 4 gigawatts (GW), a massive amount. But his journey was far from easy.

The Muridke Power Plant generates 234 megawatts (MW), but from the start in 2010 it grappled with fluctuating fuel costs, which make up some 85 percent of its operating expenses. Fuel savings of just 1 percent could boost its net income by as much as 20 percent, but the downside was equally steep.

Abdullah started looking for a solution and learned about the Industrial Internet, a digital network connecting, collecting and analyzing data from sensors installed inside machines, including turbines that produce electricity. “His answer was in numbers,” says Azeez Mohammed, president and CEO of GE Power Generation Services in the Middle East and Africa, who started talking to Abdullah in 2014.

Mohammed proposed to embed hundreds of sensors and other digital instruments in Abdullah’s turbines, analyze the data they collect, and use the information to improve the plant’s performance, optimize production and reduce unplanned downtime. But Abdullah was cautious. “The last thing I wanted was to be a guinea pig in GE’s ‘first-of-its-kind’ experiment,” he laughs.

GE’s Mohammed, however, was convinced that the project would work. So much so that he proposed Abdullah a deal: GE would pay for the sensors and the software and then split all benefits with Sapphire under a win-win scenario.

With Abdullah on board, GE dispatched a team of technicians and software engineers to Muridke. They spent a month developing a self-learning analytical model based on huge amounts of data from the gas turbines and other plant assets at Sapphire. The model allowed them to predict changes in efficiency, electricity output and other outcomes under different production scenarios without having to make any changes to the equipment itself.

In October 2014 the team connected the system to the plant’s two GE 6FA gas turbines, which GE engineers specifically designed with the Industrial Internet in mind. By December that year, the Sapphire plant has started seeing the benefits.

The heart of the system is GE’s Predix software platform and an advanced analytics application called Asset Performance Management (APM). The app allows industrial assets talk seamlessly with each other in a secure manner, and uses analytics to make the equipment more efficient.

The GE team is now working to link power plant’s steam turbine to system. The software is so versatile it doesn’t mind that turbine was the Czech industrial company Skoda, not GE.

GE estimates the Industrial Internet could bring the Muridke Power Plant millions of dollars in benefits over the next decade.

http://www.manufacturing.net/news/2015/04/industrial-internet-softw... 

[Riaz Haq]

They Might Be Giants: The World’s Largest Gas Turbines Will Light Up #Pakistan - GE Reports http://www.gereports.com/might-giants-worlds-largest-gas-turbines-w... …

Each one weighs nearly 400 tons, as much as two really big blue whales. Each one will cover thousands of miles by sea and land from the place of their birth in Belfort, France, to the farming town of Bhikki in Pakistan’s Punjab province. They are still fairly unknown, but once they reach their destination, they will affect millions of lives.

The giants that will be making their way to Asia are a pair of GE’s air-cooled 9HA gas turbines, the largest and most efficient gas turbines on the planet today. They’re capable of delivering greater than 61 percent efficiency – once the power-generation equivalent of running a four-minute mile – when used in a combined cycle configuration with steam turbines. They will become the beating heart of the Bhikki Combined Cycle Power electricity generation plant that’s being built by China’s Harbin Electric International for Punjab government’s Quaid-e-Azam Thermal Power Ltd. utility.

The new power plant will be a key weapon in Pakistan’s arsenal to roll back crippling electricity shortages that have plagued the country for years. “After a while you just have to find ways to work around the load-shedding,” says Muniza Junaid, a biosciences research associate who works at a leading Pakistani university. “It’s ironic. On the one hand, I work in one of the most advanced laboratories in the country, but on the other I can’t even heat up my dinner or run my washing machine when I want to.”

“Load-shedding” is the term locals commonly use to refer to electricity shortages. For many Pakistanis it’s a critical piece of information that determines how they plan their days, just like the weather forecast in the U.S. or Europe. Load-shedding gets ubiquitous in the sweltering summer heat, when power shortages often exceed 12 hours a day. “I don’t think you can understand what that’s like unless you’ve experienced it for yourself,” Muniza says.

Here’s what it looks like in numbers: Pakistan’s peak demand and supply gap hovers around 5 gigawatts, enough power to serve some 30 million local homes. The World Bank reported in its 2013 Enterprise Survey that more than 45 percent of local businesses identified electricity shortages as the main obstacle to doing business. The estimated value lost due to power outages tops 22 percent of annual sales.

No wonder fixing the power shortage is one of the top government priorities and a key to boosting the economy and improving the quality of life. The Bhikki plant will be the first power installation to use the turbines in the Middle East, and one of Pakistan’s most efficient. “Everything about this project is going to be larger than life – the world’s largest gas turbine, powering one of the region’s most efficient power plants, generating electricity for millions of households, as well as industry,” says Sardar Haider Khan, the local lead for GE Power & Water’s power generation products business.

The 9HA is the result of a $2 billion investment by Power & Water. It uses technology originally developed for supersonic jet engines. GE refers to this practice of sharing knowledge among different businesses the GE Store.

The turbine can reach full load in a mere 10 minutes – just a little longer than a plane getting ready to take off – and also offers the flexibility to run on a range of gas and liquid fuels. This is critical for fuel-importing countries such as Pakistan.

The two units at Bhikki will be operated on imported “re-gasified” liquefied natural gas (RLNG), but will be able to use substitute fuels if price or availability of RLNG starts to fluctuate.

Together, they will add more than 1.1 GW to the national grid by 2017 – the equivalent power needed to supply more than six million Pakistani homes. And that is a feat worthy of giants.

[Riaz Haq]

#Lahore, #Islamabad: ADB’s nudge pushes govt to smart meters, new billing system. #Pakistan http://tribune.com.pk/story/979590/lahore-islamabad-adbs-nudge-push... …

Driven by a major push from a foreign lender, the government has decided to clear two projects of installing advanced electricity meters and implementing a new billing system valuing over $470 million, endeavours it had so far withheld due to high pricing and objections over technology.

The projects to install smart electricity meters and a new centralised billing system in Lahore and Islamabad will be taken up by the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) in its upcoming meeting for approval, according to Ministry of Planning and Development officials.

The PC-1s of both projects have been pending in the Energy Wing of the Planning Commission since January this year. The energy wing has decided to table the projects in the CDWP meeting amid growing pressures from the Asian Development Bank, said officials.

The latest push came just a month ago when the Director General of ADB for Central and West Asia Department, Sean O’Sullivan, took up the issue with Finance Minister Ishaq Dar during his visit to Islamabad. Earlier, in May, ADB’s Vice President Wencai Zhang urged Pakistani authorities to obtain the $1 billion loan for the installation of smart meters.

Dar had promised that he would look into the matter, agreeing that the energy wing’s objections should not stall projects, said officials of the Ministry of Finance.

The CDWP has a mandate to recommend projects valued at over Rs3 billion for final approval of the Executive Committee of National Economic Council, which is headed by the finance minister. Minister for Planning and Development chairs the CDWP meeting.

The ADB is eager to provide the $1 billion loan for the smart metes and billing system projects. In the first phase, the ADB has offered $400 million for installing smart meters in Lahore and Islamabad electricity distribution companies, officials added.

In current year’s Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP), the government has put the estimated cost of each project at Rs30.6 billion, bringing the total price of both projects to Rs61.2 billion or roughly $590 million. This includes Rs47.6 billion or roughly $455 million foreign loan.

However, revised estimates show the cost of Islamabad Electricity Supply Company (IESCO) project at Rs18.6 billion, including Rs8.8 billion in foreign loan. The cost of Lahore Electricity Supply Company (Lesco) project is kept at the same level of Rs30.6 billion, but its foreign loan component has been reduced to Rs13.1 billion.