Over Half of Faisalabad Textile Units, Power Looms Shut, Says PPP

Key Points:

PPP district president Muhammad Ijaz Chaudhry says more than 50 per cent of Faisalabad’s textile industrial units and power loom factories have closed.
He says the energy crisis remains unresolved and the economic burden on the poor is growing by the day.
He says the purchasing power of middle-class families has collapsed and education and medicines are beyond the common man’s reach.
He demands an immediate cut in the prices of sui gas, LPG and electricity, saying the economy cannot recover while industries stay shut.

FAISALABAD: More than half of Faisalabad’s textile industrial units and power loom factories have closed amid the energy crisis and rising costs, Pakistan Peoples Party district president Muhammad Ijaz Chaudhry has said.

He said the energy crisis had yet to be resolved and the economic burden on the poor was increasing with every passing day. The purchasing power of middle-class families, he said, had collapsed.

He said meeting education expenses and buying medicines for treatment had become the most difficult task for the common man.

Unemployment and misery, he said, were at their peak in Faisalabad, the city known as Pakistan’s Manchester. Workers’ homes were facing starvation as robberies and thefts rose on the back of joblessness and poverty.

He asked when the state would play a mother’s role for the poor, quoting the line: “Will you do justice when creation itself has perished?”

The biggest burden on the people, he said, was the expenditure of the bureaucracy and an unruly elite that included the rulers themselves. A handful of people, he said, were devouring the country.

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He said government policies and unchecked inflation had ruined the farmer and left the labourer and the common man in misery.

The economy, he said, would improve only when industries ran and could not be fixed without reducing the prices of sui gas, LPG and electricity.

Everything of daily necessity had become expensive, he said. If the prices of electricity and gas were not falling, he asked, how had inflation come down, as claimed by the PML-N government?

He said the people could no longer bear the burden of electricity bills and demanded that power prices be reduced immediately.

He expressed these views while talking to residents of various chaks and party workers in his constituency, NA-99. A large number of industries across the country, he said, were still lying closed.