I have spent the better part of twenty years doing something that should, in any functioning state, be entirely unremarkable. I have been asking for electricity data.
Not secrets. Not classified intelligence. Not the kind of information that spy agencies bury in vaults. I have been asking for the operational data of Pakistan's electricity sector, generation figures, capacity utilisation, independent power producer contract details, fuel costs, load factors, the basic numerical record of an industry that consumes billions of dollars of public money every year and sends an electricity bill to every household in the country. I work at Apex Accountability, where accountability without data is simply a word. And for twenty years, Pakistan's power sector has looked me in the eye and said, in effect: you are not entitled to know.
I once raised this directly with the Chairman of the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority and the Managing Director of the Private Power and Infrastructure Board. I asked why the data of a public utility, funded by public money and regulated in the public interest, was being protected with the ferocity normally reserved for a pharmaceutical patent or a military secret.
The response, delivered with bureaucratic composure, was effectively this: the data was sensitive, its release required process, and the complete picture was never fully digitised anyway. What they were describing, without using the word, was omertà. The absolute code of silence that the Italian Mafia perfected over generations, where information is power, power is money, and the first rule of the institution is that outsiders never see the books. The Mafia, at least, has the honesty to admit it is a criminal enterprise.
I say this not in bitterness but in the exhaustion of a man who has watched his country's most critical sector operate for two decades as a zero-knowledge architecture a system designed so that even its own regulator cannot tell you with confidence how much electricity the country actually produces, how much it wastes, how much it pays for capacity that sits idle, and how much of the consumer's bill is pure extraction dressed in the language of regulation.
And then, just weeks ago, the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025–26 arrived. And I felt something I have not felt in a very long time when reading an official document: I felt the omertà break, just slightly, just enough for the light to enter. And what that light revealed was so extraordinary that I must ask a simple question, directed at no one in particular but which the Federal Minister for Power must answer for himself: if these numbers are true, what exactly has been the policy of his ministry?
Here is the contradiction that should end careers and almost certainly will not. A few weeks ago, Federal Minister Sardar Awais Ahmed Khan Leghari was declaring publicly that Pakistan's actual reliable grid-connected generation capacity is somewhere between 29,000 and 34,000 MW. He was lamenting the gap between installed capacity and what the grid can actually deliver. He was, in other words, presenting this gap as a known, accepted, unfortunate reality of a system under stress.
The Ministry of Power and the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority are following the exact trajectory of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited
The Economic Survey, published by his own government, documents that as of March 2026, Pakistan's total installed electricity generation capacity stood at 49,651 MW — an 8.5 per cent increase over the 45,782 MW recorded in the corresponding period of the financial year 2025. The minister speaks of 29,000 to 34,000 MW.
The Survey declares 49,651 MW. In any country where accountability functions at even a minimal level, a minister whose stated figure differs from his own government's published data by 15,000 to 20,000 MW would either correct the record or resign. In Pakistan's power sector, this contradiction will be noted, attributed to definitional differences, and quietly buried.
But I cannot bury it, because I understand what that gap represents. It represents tens of billions of rupees in capacity purchase prices being paid every month to power plants that are either not connected to the grid in any meaningful sense, are running at fractions of their nameplate capacity, or have been closed entirely.
This money does not come from the sky. It comes from the electricity consumer from the factory owner in Faisalabad who cannot compete with Chinese manufacturers because his energy costs are three times theirs, from the small trader in Karachi whose shop must close at nine in the evening, and from the farmer in Punjab who has abandoned the grid entirely and borrowed money to install a solar pump. These people are paying the capacity purchase price of plants they have never seen and will never benefit from. That is not energy policy. That is organised extraction.
Now I must speak about the one thing in Pakistan's energy story that has actually worked and worked precisely because it happened without the ministry's help, and despite the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority's persistent attempts to undermine it.
Rooftop solar net metering is the most successful energy programme in Pakistan's recent history. I have been writing about it, advocating for it, and explaining its technical and economic logic since 2024 in these pages and in official correspondence to every relevant authority. I explained that rooftop solar addresses energy security, reduces dependence on imported liquefied natural gas and coal, puts power generation in the hands of the consumer, and does all of this at a cost that no thermal plant, no matter how efficiently managed, can approach.
In financial year 2022–23, the three China–Pakistan Economic Corridor coal power plants and four liquefied natural gas mega-plants, built as the engines of industrial salvation, were generating electricity at the highest rates. A rooftop solar system, amortised over its lifespan, produces electricity at a fraction of these figures.
The citizens of Pakistan, without a subsidy, without a government campaign, without a single rupee of public support, figured this out for themselves. They looked at their electricity bills, calculated the payback period of a solar installation, and made a rational decision. The result is documented in the Economic Survey with a clarity that I find both vindicating and heartbreaking. Of the total installed generation capacity of 49,651 MW, no less than 7,319 MW now comes from net metering. An extraordinary surge driven almost entirely by ordinary Pakistanis investing their own savings in their own energy security.
And what has been the ministry's response? To study how to move from net metering to net billing. To clip the incentive. To ensure that the solar energy a family produces does not displace the expensive electricity the state is contractually obligated to buy from independent power producers, it cannot afford. The ministry cannot meet demand with 49,651 MW of installed capacity, keeps markets closed at 9:00 in the evening, and simultaneously tries to drive consumers back onto the grid it cannot manage. Baat to sach hai, magar baat hai ruswai ki.
Let me close with a prophecy I am prepared to stake my professional reputation on. The Ministry of Power and the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority are following the exact trajectory of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited. When the mobile phone arrived, the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited did not die suddenly. It became irrelevant gradually, then completely.
The landline poles still stand on the streets of Pakistan. The copper still runs underground. But nobody calls anymore. Within a decade, possibly sooner, the electricity distribution poles lining Pakistan's streets will serve a similar ceremonial function. The rooftop, the battery, the neighbourhood micro-grid: these are not distant technologies. They are already here, being installed by the same people the state has spent two decades failing.
For twenty years, I have asked for the data. The Economic Survey has now published enough of it to make the verdict clear. The installed capacity figure alone — 49,651 MW against a minister's admission of 29,000 to 34,000 MW — is the accounting of a system that has been, in the most precise meaning of the term, running a protection racket against its own consumers.
The books are open. The numbers are there. And in the tradition of the institution I have spent twenty years interrogating, I suspect no one will be held to account. The wires on those poles will dry clothes before that happens.