There comes a moment in every nation’s story when silence becomes complicity. For Pakistan, that moment arrived the day the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) announced it would hire a private firm to conduct a forensic audit of power plants. What sounded like a routine bureaucratic exercise revealed something far darker: that the very institution created to regulate and protect the country’s energy sector was, in fact, hollow, a monument to incompetence and self-interest. This revelation should have shaken the skies. Yet the heavens stayed silent.
When every record of the Independent Power Producers lies within NEPRA’s own library, its decision to outsource the audit exposes not just incompetence but collapse. The tender for a forensic audit is nothing less than NEPRA’s self-inflicted suicide, a public confession that its sprawling army of officials has neither the capacity nor the will to perform the very duty for which it exists.
For twenty-seven long years, NEPRA sat at the helm of Pakistan’s power sector. It was supposed to guard the public interest, ensure transparency, and hold private power producers accountable. Instead, it surrendered its authority, outsourced its duties, and made Pakistan a dependent nation begging for light and drowning in debt. Today, NEPRA and its twin regulator, the Oil & Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA), stand not as watchdogs but as symbols of betrayal snakes in the nation’s sleeves.
In 2025, NEPRA floated a tender for a forensic audit of 225 MW Independent Power Producers (IPPs) after one company refused to renegotiate its Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). The standoff laid bare the deep structural rot in the power sector, a sector built on Pakistan’s 2002 Power Generation Policy, which guaranteed investors' profits backed by sovereign guarantees.
Under that policy, investors were promised returns of up to 15 per cent. When NEPRA recently pushed to reduce that rate to 12 per cent, the decision was celebrated as reform. In reality, it translated into a $52 million loss for one company, a drop in the ocean of a sector already drowning in circular debt exceeding Rs 3 trillion. Pakistan’s citizens paid the price through higher tariffs, surcharges, and the silent theft of opportunity.
This tragedy was not born overnight. It is the cumulative result of decades of neglect, bureaucracy, and elite capture, a system in which those meant to serve the nation instead serve themselves.
The true shock came when NEPRA admitted that it lacked the technical capacity to perform the most basic audit functions. Heat-rate testing, a measure directly linked to electricity cost, lies at the core of any power audit. A lower heat rate means cheaper electricity. It is a calculation that modern software, even a simple Excel sheet, can handle. Yet NEPRA, with ten offices across Pakistan and hundreds of employees, confessed it could not do this.
The real war, the more devastating one, is internal. It is economic sabotage, waged not with bombs but with balance sheets
One of us, Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi, once demonstrated how to perform a comprehensive heat-rate audit using publicly available data. His 2011 audit of Karachi Electric (KE) became a case study in engineering schools. Yet when he presented his findings to NEPRA, the chairman, a retired bureaucrat, asked again and again, “How did you get the data?” The question revealed the real tragedy: NEPRA does not just lack capability; it lacks curiosity.
Its official reports on IPPs data are filled with blank columns labelled “Not Available”. That phrase, two simple words, has become the epitaph of Pakistan’s power sector.
A senior NEPRA member once said that reducing Pakistan’s circular debt to zero would be “a miracle of the 21st century”. He was right, but not because the debt is inherently unmanageable. It is because NEPRA, the Central Power Purchasing Agency (CPPA), and the Ministry of Power protect the Independent Power Producers more than they protect the people.
Circular debt is not just an economic burden; it is an instrument of national weakness. Every rupee poured into inflated capacity payments is a rupee stolen from defence, education, and development. Every unaccounted megawatt fuels instability.
And yet, even when our voices raised alarms over Rs 1,320 billion released to IPPs, the government stayed quiet. No one dared ask the real questions. Why are 60 to 80 per cent of fossil-fuel-based plants’ tariffs allowed to hide behind technical jargon and complex equations? Perhaps because regulators are part of the same herd.
Across the border, in India, the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) conducts regular audits of power plants to ensure efficiency, compliance, and transparency. It works closely with the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to carry out technical performance reviews. In Pakistan, NEPRA’s version of the same process is reduced to a clerical exercise. The monthly fuel cost adjustments that NEPRA touts as “technical evaluations” are little more than paperwork. Even a municipal clerk reviewing a house plan shows more diligence.
It is a tale of two regulators, one striving for efficiency, the other sinking into irrelevance. Pakistan’s leaders often speak of external enemies. They invoke the spectre of India, of conspiracies, of foreign sabotage. But the real war, the more devastating one, is internal. It is economic sabotage, waged not with bombs but with balance sheets.
While the state chases phantom insurgencies and Fitna-tul-Khuruj, it turns a blind eye to the slow, silent betrayal from within. The circular debt bleeding the economy is not just an accounting problem; it is a strategic wound. Every dollar of inefficiency drains the strength of Pakistan’s military and undermines its sovereignty. This is not just economic mismanagement. It is national sabotage.
As of April 2025, NEPRA’s chairman earns over Rs 3.247 million a month, according to Dawn. A staggering salary for presiding over a failing system. Beneath him, layers of bureaucrats collect allowances, perks, and bonuses, all paid from the pockets of citizens who sit in darkness when the grid collapses. A regulator that cannot regulate. A watchdog that feasts with the wolves. This is Pakistan’s energy tragedy.
When NEPRA abandons its duty, the damage runs deeper than the economy. It erodes national faith. It tells every young engineer, every struggling business owner, that integrity doesn’t matter, that mediocrity pays better than merit.
Pakistan stands at a crossroads. One path leads to accountability, reform, and renewal, a future where regulators serve the public, not private interests. The other path, the one we are on now, leads to decay, a future where the lights flicker, debts rise, and hope dies quietly.
We can no longer afford silence. The time for euphemisms has passed. If Pakistan is to survive as a sovereign, self-respecting state, it must confront its internal enemies, the NEPRA, who betrayed their people and turned a proud nation into a supplicant. The sky will not fall when NEPRA is shelved.