Bharat Rakshak

Highly profitable freight train service of cash-strapped Pakistan Railways has come to a virtual halt as out of 156 working locomotives only six are operating on the only remaining freight train still carrying goods.

Sources told PPI that previously around 60% profits of PR was earned through its goods trains. Up to Rs10 million in revenue was earned daily from these goods trains. Around 15 trains used to be in operation and each had 65 to 72 bogies. However, only one goods train service is functioning at present causing millions of rupees worth losses to this important national organisation. In the past the service was high on the preference list of the business community and people in general as it was the cheapest mode to transport goods from one place to another. On the other hand, PR’s loss has became road network transporters’ gain as they have grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

When contacted the Deputy Divisional Superintendent Nisar Ahmed Khan admitted that PR is severely short on locomotives and said that there is only one goods train service left. He further said that the organisation has not received a single penny from the federal government out of the bailout package of Rs11.1 billion.

Chairman Pakistan Railways Worker’s Union Manzoor Ahmed Razi said that Rs600 million is needed to fix 142 repairable locomotives. The repair work can be done in any of the four workshops in Risalpura Station, Mughalpura, Karachi Cantonment or Rawalpindi. He also urged higher administration to rent 50 engines from India on urgent basis so that the performance of both freight train service and passenger service can be improved.

PR has 502 locomotives out of which only 156 are in working condition whereas 142 can be repaired. Experts say that most working locomotives are overloaded whereas only three or four traction motors are being used as opposed to the requirement of six, causing frequent engine failure.

They further say that PR needs 350 locomotives to run on full capacity.

We will give them not 50 , but probably 100 or even 200 engines, going by what this govt will and could do. We will go even further and help them in implementing computer booking system if they dont have one

Load Shedding induced riots in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan:

Violent protests against loadshedding enter second day

Load Shedding induced riots in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan continue:

No letup in power woes, protests

Pakistan is living from tanker to tanker
http://tribune.com.pk/story/267057/anal ... to-tanker/

A nation thats living from Tanker to Tanker, thinks about Gazhwa E Hind, and there r people to support, that man!

^^
They are talking about fighting and defeating USA now. Instead of 5000 nuclear plants intl community should build that many mental asylums in TSP.

My eyes just lit up reading that article. God forbid,If another 26/11 happens ,we know where to strike first.

^^
They are talking about fighting and defeating USA now. Instead of 5000 nuclear plants intl community should build that many mental asylums in TSP.

Pakistan is so weak on their finances that one small nudge and it is free fall to hell. A saboteur disrupting the tankers and refinery will turn the nation into uber-chaos.

Pakistan is so weak on their finances that one small nudge and it is free fall to hell. A saboteur disrupting the tankers and refinery will turn the nation into uber-chaos.

Am sure India or Amrika can do these honours when push comes to shove...

Violent protests against loadshedding enter second day

Load Shedding induced riots in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan continue:

No letup in power woes, protests

Pakistan has lost 75 trillion dollars in the war against terror in the last month alone and the world must build 500 nuclear plants in Pakistan to compensate.

Pakistan is so weak on their finances that one small nudge and it is free fall to hell. A saboteur disrupting the tankers and refinery will turn the nation into uber-chaos.

A shift in government focus towards the IT industry may ease down pressure on the economic growth of the country. The IT industry is not as energy-intensive as the textile is. It is important to note that the IT industry in Pakistan is not as power-intensive as the textile is. The IT firms in Pakistan have not closed their operations even for a single day due to power shortfall as the computer machines are not as power intensive as the spinning looms are.

I am happy to hear that Pakistan is still able to run so called "computer machines" but this guy hasn't heard of anything like "mission critical servers" which almost needs continuous power supply and without them banking, airline booking etc will be in chaos.

What kind of lahori logic is this? Labourers who work in powerlooms now will they be able to IT programming??

New day. New demands for a bailout. This time around, it’s the Pakistan Railways. The sound of chugging you hear is not of a PR engine but of the PR chugging oodles of money. With a loss to the tune of 80 billion and already having been given one bailout in January, it is nowhere near carrying its weight. It’s too much of a cash-guzzler to be viable for the government but it’s too critical to be abandoned.

This is a problem that you just can’t throw money at. Give it a bailout today and it will be back for more later. What is needed is a complete retooling of its structure. Declining revenue is an issue but generating demand for cheap transportation should not be a problem. The real rub lies elsewhere. Corruption, inefficiency, mismanagement: we’ve heard these buzzwords so many times that they’ve lost meaning. But these are the meaningful terms when it comes to this crisis.

PR could possibly hold the ignominious mantle of being the most corrupt institution in the country – and in Pakistan, that is saying a lot. According to the Auditor General’s report, the organisation lost almost 4 billion rupees to corrupt practices last year. Be it pilferage of equipment, kickbacks in buying of locomotives and contaminated oil, squandering fortunes on prime real estate or ticket-less travel, these things are adding up to PR’s woes. Mismanagement is also a scourge. From gross overstaffing (much of it due to political interference) to genius moves like buying unsuitable trains for our tracks, it is afflicted with every managerial crisis. To top it off, the floods haven’t been kind to its infrastructure. It is one unholy melange.

Pakistan’s military commanders and business community are increasingly worried about the poor performance of the economy under the rule of President Asif Ali Zardari. The fiscal deficit has widened, security threats have chased away investors and mounting debts have forced an energy crisis on the nation. Economic growth, buoyed by the rural economy, textile exports and remittances, has slipped to about 3 per cent this year. Earlier this month, the central bank resorted to emergency measures to spur industrial development and boost demand ahead of likely parliamentary elections next year by cutting benchmark lending rates by 150 basis points. Sakib Sherani, a leading economist, describes the economy as “going into a freefall towards a big macroeconomic crisis.”Just over the border, India’s economy is growing at about 8 per cent a year. The difference has been clocked in Islamabad. Senior ministers say that there is no reason why Pakistan, which had a higher rate of growth than India in the 1980s, should not grow at the same pace as the rest of the region.High quality global journalism requires investment. Some Islamabad-based diplomats are enthused by the trade developments, viewing them as turning a corner in the hostile relations between India and Pakistan. They were struck that Islamabad signalled a promise of better trade terms only days after New Delhi had formalised a strategic partnership with Kabul, an agreement distrusted by Pakistan’s security establishment. “It’s more crucial for Pakistan than it is for [fast-growing] India,” said one western diplomat. “It could have a profound impact on the way the country feels about itself. The logic until now has been a very security aware, zero-sum game.”Hasan Askari Rizvi, Lahore-based military historian, said: “The army has probably concluded that they can’t fight on every front. There are too many fronts. But their decision to accept an MFN status for India is probably also because they feel that this does not compromise Pakistan’s most vital interests.”

http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=9786&Cat=13

Secretary Finance Dr Waqar Masood confirmed on Saturday that the IMF mission would hold talks with Pakistani authorities from November 9 to determine exact health of the national economy and give its assessment to move forward in the desired direction. Alone in this ongoing fiscal year, Pakistan will have to repay the Fund loan amounting to $1.2 billion starting from February 2012. It was assessment of Pakistan’s economic managers that the foreign currency reserves would deplete in the range of $1.5 to $2 billion in the fiscal year keeping in view exports growth and growing remittances but in the last three months the foreign reserves dipped by $1.4 billion, is causing serious concern amongst the government’s economic managers.

The fiscal side of Pakistan’s economy is the major cause of economic ills and the IMF will put a condition by giving few months period to get approval of RGST from the Parliament. The autonomy of the SBP will also be another condition of the IMF programme. Pakistan’s top economic managers were conceding in private discussions that if oil prices witnessed upward trends in international market and government failed to undertake institutional reforms to overcome difficulties of public finances then the country would have to approach the IMF for another bailout package earlier than expected.

Thousands of employees of electric supply companies staged demonstrations against privatization of the Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco) and appointment of private chief executives in electric supply companies on Tuesday.

Comment: The gravity of the financial crisis and the threat of a ripple effect are highlighted by the occurrence of even informal discussions about shrinking the European Union. In studying violent political instability, living systems under stress always contract. The government reduces the volume, quality and frequency of services it provides and the geographic area over which it provides them in order to reach a sustainable position short of collapsing. It tries to find a set of lines it can hold to avoid collapse and to prepare for returning to normality.

Contraction may be understood as the first step in a process whose ultimate end state is organizational or systemic collapse. Collapse is not inevitable, but more frequent than recovery in instability case studies. Recovery almost always requires significant outside intervention of some sort, such as a surge, and even that might only provide temporary relief from the stress that caused the shrinking.

{Apply this to TSP and see where it is contracting. Its obvious that US aid is the outside intervention that is keeping the system alive on life support.}

A contraction of the EU in this financial crisis would parallel the behavior of governments experiencing violent internal instability, such the insurgency in Afghanistan or the opposition uprising in Syria. In both countries, the government's ability to provide public services has contracted under violent stress. In Afghanistan the US troop surge has provided temporary relief in some areas, but is not a permanent solution.

The Greek bailout is a surge that has proved inadequate to stop the financial crisis or keep it from spreading. The increase in bond yields represents one aspect of shrinkage, of credit worthiness.

This is not a prediction of EU collapse or Italian collapse, but it is a warning that long experience shows that once living systems begin to contract they seldom recover on their own and might not even with outside help. Financial systems also are living systems.

The plan will reduce the output of hydropower units by more than 5,500MW, resulting in loadshedding of two to fours hours a day across the country.