Further shortage of gas and load management plan of the Sui Northern Gas in winter would create serious problems for the industries and commercial consumers, stated Mr.Mahfooz Elahi, President of Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry addressing a meeting of the representatives of industrialists and traders.

He expressed great concern on government’s twodays gas load management plans for the industries and CNG stations and said that it would further aggravate the problems of commuters and industrial setups.

President said that government still could not develop long term strategy and planning to tackle this situation, which is putting an adverse effect on the production. He said that especially exporters of textile would face lots of problems, because they wouldnot be able to produce and export textile products at the given time frame.

Mr.Mahfooz Elahi said that government without planning, allowed to setup a large number of CNG stations across the country, as a result majority of the vehicles in the country have been converted to run on CNG. He said that in the absence of CNG for two-days, commuters would face great problems because of stoppage of CNG vehicles and paying extra fair for travelling on petrol and diesel vehicles.

He said that government should not allow to further setup CNG stations and importing CNG busses, until problem of shortage of gas is solved. President said that work on laying gas pipeline from Iran should be completed on war footings and gas fields which are not producing gas upto the optimum level due to faults, must be maintained on priority basis.

Mr.Mahfooz Elahi said that a few years ago, Green Pakistan concept was introduced by the government and GNG culture was promoted without any planning. He said that policymakers and strategists should seriously develop a concrete plan for the utilization of gas and to bring the general public and businesses entities out from the gas crises.

He said that due to poor planning, business communities is going in deep troubles and demanded the government to prepare result oriented action plans, instead of only lip service.