Pakistan power crisis to end by 2017: Sharif

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has promised his countrymen that the decade-old power crisis in the country would end by 2017, officials said today.
"We will end power shortages by the end of 2017," Sharif said.
The prime minister said the power supply was better this year as compared to the previous year and stressed it will improve further over the next years.
A number of ongoing power projects including the 960MW Neelum Jhelum, 1400MW Tarbella-IV and 1000MW by LNG would help address the power shortage, an official statement quoted Sharif as saying while addressing a ceremony here yesterday.
Unusually long hours of power outages has been haunting Pakistan for about a decade, now.

And the power crisis, along with a searing heatwave, has compounded the trouble of residents during the holy month of Ramadan, when the mahjority Muslim population of the country undertake a dawn-to-dusk fast.

Sharif, before coming to power in 2013, had pledged to fix the crisis at the earliest.
But even after more than two years in office, his government is yet to control the electricity crisis, though, improvements in the power supply have been noticed.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government is working on several projects and has announced to include more than 10,500 MW in the national grid by the end of 2018, when the first phase of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is expected to be completed.

Power generation is a key component of the USD 45-billion corridor which includes a network of roads, rails, business parks and power stations.