Benjamin Franklin said, “Common sense is something that everyone needs, few have, and none think they lack.” This is a great quotation that sums up our national dilemma. We face existential challenges on the economic front and are experiencing almost unsurmountable problems in the power and energy sectors. Many problems that we have created ourselves have outgrown to a size where handling them looks almost impossible.

1. In Search of Reasonable Thinking
Kashif Mateen Ansari Published February 06, 2024
Benjamin Franklin said, “Common sense is something that
everyone needs, few have, and none think they lack.”
This is a great quotation that sums up our national dilemma. We face
existential challenges on the economic front and are experiencing
almost unsurmountable problems in the power and energy sectors.
Many problems that we have created ourselves have outgrown to a
size where handling them looks almost impossible.
To name a few, the overall debt burden on the economy, circular
debt, lack of adequate tax base, unskilled and superficially educated
young generation. This list can go on further, but these problems are
part of our common drawing room discourse at the national level.
What we will find talking about soon will be problems related to water scarcity and issues of food security.
So, the list of our problems is going to be further enhanced due to the lack of appropriate and timely
decision making and policy action.
When we read the papers or look at social media, we find that very competent people have put their
minds to these problems, tried to enumerate them and give solutions but there appears to be no progress
in the right direction.
The problem is not about identifying the issues or even enumerating the solutions, it is about the will to
make the right decisions and the sincerity to follow through on them.
What is the relationship of common sense? It is about learning to understand that if we waste our water
resources and do nothing to conserve and add new reservoirs, we will soon find ourselves in a fix. We are
already a water-stressed country, and it is a few years from now that we will become a water scarce
country.

2. According to the Institute of World Resources, Pakistan ranks 14th among the 17 ‘extremely high baseline
water stress’ countries of the world.
According to a report by PIDE, Pakistan wastes one-third of the water available and that water availability
in Pakistan has plummeted from 5,229 cubic meters per inhabitant in 1962 to just 1,187 in 2017. So, we
started as a resource rich country with respect to water and now our availability of water has gone down
almost 5 times. What a great indicator of failure of common sense at the national level.
We have been boasting about our agriculture, but our common sense never prevailed in telling us that
without adopting modern techniques our productivity will go far below the global average and we will not
be able to feed ourselves.
To put things in perspective Pakistan produces almost one- third of wheat per hector as compared to global
best productivity yields. This is just around 3.1 tons of wheat from one hectare, as compared to 8.1 tons
produced in France.
Similarly, Pakistan produces about 50% less cotton per hectare, as compared to what is produced in China.
We produce almost half the yield of sugarcane per hectare as compared to Egypt. The numbers would
show a similar pattern when we look at maize, rice or other crops.
Where we produce anything of value, unfortunately we don’t have an appropriate supply chain, e.g. fruits,
it is the unavailability of cold chain to store, transport and export it to bring any value to the economy.
Let’s talk about energy security and affordability, unfortunately we have made such a mess of this whole
sector that it might take decades before things are put right. If we want to go for cheap electricity, the
cheapest form of energy is the one that is not used. Conservation of power and fuel must have been a
cornerstone of our policymaking in the past, yet it is not even now appearing as a meaningful agenda item
at the top for our policy makers. Our building codes do not sufficiently focus on conservation of energy
and as our energy utilization is the highest in the domestic sector, so any meaningful reduction there can
have an impact on our fuel import bill and hence foreign exchange requirements.
Another sore issue is circular debt of energy that has ballooned to more than five trillion rupees, it has
become a jinn that is refusing to go back into the bottle. Our wrong policymaking laced by our desire to
appease and loot both, appease the masses when that matters and loot by the elite till the time they can
do it, has brought us here. Now every day a new solution is either proposed or a new approach to salvation
is identified. Today we will not dwell much on circular debt, but common sense says that if we use power

3. without paying the actual cost of producing it, someone needs to foot the bill. If the government keeps on
taking up the difference through subsidies or free units or payment guarantees, this is just a Ponzi scheme
that will collapse one day. Unfortunately, that time has come where the burden has become too large to
hide anywhere. It doesn’t need any professionalism to understand that if we keep on taking paracetamol
for fever without administering medicine for the underlying disease, it doesn’t help much in most cases.
Someone asked me how to bring down the cost of electricity for the consumers. My answer was to
investigate what constitutes the cost of electricity for the consumers. According to fair estimates, the cost
of electricity constitutes one-third the actual cost of producing it, one third attributable to line losses and
theft and one-third for the capacity charge that is there because generation capacity cannot be utilized
due to various factors, including low demand, lack of foreign exchange for fuel or inability of transmission
lines to transport power, etc. From this point on it is just common sense to understand where we must be
focusing our efforts to bring down the cost to consumers. As it was not the intention of today’s discussion
to find a solution to this problem so we would stop here but it is pertinent to point out that one of the
solutions that has been peddled innumerable times to re-negotiate signed sovereign contracts to solve
this problem is totally opposite to common sense, if this solution is analyzed properly we would
understand that it will harm the economy and future investments in any sector in the long run whereas it
will create miniscule impact in the cost of electricity to the consumers. Common sense demands that we
decrease the losses and theft to minimum, increase investment in transmission as that is a bottleneck for
utilization of power that gives rise to capacity charge payments and support the growth of industry to use
that excess generation capacity that has already been installed.
But above all isn’t it common sense to stop investing in power generation now and start investing in
transmission and distributionassets?
An old saying that always resonates in my mind is: “When you find yourself in a hole stop digging.” If we
need to resolve our problems we have to think out of the box and understand that our old ways of
policymaking have failed us.
The writer is a Harvard Alumni & can be reached at kashifmateenansari@post.harvard.edu and tweets as
@kashifmansari