As Pakistan’s finance managers crunch numbers to raise pitifully low national revenue, quick policy reversals to meet the gap will inevitably cause more harm than good.

Tragically, however, the ongoing practice is in line with the record of the ruling structure, where shortcuts to tackle the immediate rot rather than embracing long overdue painful reforms remains the norm. Within this framework, the reported plan to force Pakistan’s solar energy consumers to scale down the benefits they reap from existing and future generation says much about a wider crisis surrounding the country.

In brief, Pakistan’s way forward will just not lead towards greater stability surrounding the economy, irrespective of the costs enforced on consumers – including solarized ones.

In recent years, Pakistan’s electricity consumers were encouraged to adopt solar generation as a way to increase power generation, using a natural source with no fuel cost involved. The practice has clearly become popular with a variety of consumers, from the high end urban ones to rural dwellers. The idea of ‘net metering’ as repeatedly mentioned encouraged consumers to sell the power they generated to the national grid, while getting billed for any power consumed on top of what was sold. In many instances, consumers who ran surpluses were given an electricity credit for........

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