Karachi, lights out: an unsustainable tariff breaking the city of teeming millions

Karachi was promised light. Instead, it was handed a bill dressed up as relief. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles over a city that has been lied to one time too many. It is not the loud anger of a single betrayal. It is quieter than that. It is a mother in Korangi doing the same subtraction she has done every month for years, watching the numbers refuse to shrink no matter how carefully she rations the fan, the fridge, the single bulb left burning after dark. It is a factory owner in Karachi staring at a fuel cost adjustment line he did not create and cannot challenge, wondering for the hundredth time whether this is the year the machines finally stop for good. Karachi has absorbed disappointment after disappointment from the very institutions meant to protect it, and in October 2025, it absorbed one more, delivered in the gentlest possible language, a tariff cut of Rs7. 6 per unit, presented as mercy. Nine months on, the mercy has revealed itself as arithmetic done in the regulator’s favour, but the city is left holding the difference as usual. Before anything else, sit with what Karachi actually is, because the tragedy here is not that a city was shortchanged. It is that the city being shortchanged is the one holding the rest of the country up. Karachi generates the largest share of Pakistan’s tax revenue. Its port moves the exports that earn the foreign exchange the whole nation depends on to buy fuel, wheat, medicine. Its textile mills, packaging plants, trading houses employ millions of families who have no second city to fall back on if the machines go quiet. When Karachi’s energy becomes unaffordable, it is not a local inconvenience. It is a wound opened at the exact point the country can least afford to bleed. Every rupee added to a factory’s energy bill here is a rupee that cannot go into a worker’s wage, a rupee that makes a Karachi made shirt more expensive than a Bangladeshi one on the same shelf in the same European store, a rupee that quietly, without ceremony, becomes one fewer job in a city that already has too many people chasing too few of them. This is not abstraction. This is a father who used to work a night shift in Korangi and now does not, because the mill could not carry the new fuel cost adjustment and stay open. The first wound is the Rs28-billion the tariff cut never mentioned. NEPRA’s October decision did not simply reduce a rate. In the same breath, it reopened two years of Fuel Cost Adjustment calculations that had already been settled, already been credited back to electricity users who had, for once, believed something had gone their way. Those calculations were then revised upward, clawing back roughly Rs28 billion from people who had already spent that relief on rent, on school fees, on the small mercies a slightly lighter bill allows a household to imagine. The retrospective charge translates into an extra Rs2. 5 to Rs3. 5 per unit for a full year, sitting entirely outside the Uniform FCA structure most electricity users have never been told exists, let alone understand. Karachi’s industrial electricity users were obviously desperate enough to take the fight to the Sindh High Court, and a stay currently holds that Rs28 billion in suspension while the matter waits for a resolution nobody can promise a date for. But a stay is not a victory. It is a held breath. Every month it continues is another month a factory cannot quote a firm price to a foreign buyer, another month a household budgets around a number that could still turn against it without warning. There is something quietly devastating about being told you have been given something, only to learn months later that it was measured out so it could be taken back. The second wound runs deeper than any single number, because it is about whether anything here can be trusted at all. NEPRA’s October reversal did not just revise a figure. It tore up its own determination from May of the same year, a ruling reached only after more than two years of hearings, submissions, and public consultation. To dismantle that in a matter of months is to tell every investor, every lender, every ordinary user of electricity trying to plan a year ahead that nothing set down on paper here is actually final. The market understood this instantly and reacted the way markets react to fear. The share price of the Karachi’s power utility, K Electric, fell. Shareholders began speaking openly of international arbitration, Shanghai Electric Power, after years of pursuing a $1. 77 billion acquisition of the company, simply walked away, naming regulatory unpredictability as the reason. More horrifically, financial analysts now project that KE’s roughly Rs4 billion profit in FY24 could collapse into losses of Rs70 to 80 billion, with investors bracing for cumulative annual losses approaching Rs100 billion. Behind those figures is a harder truth still. The utility’s investors who cannot trust its own regulator, has no reason to invest in the grid that keeps Karachi’s lights on, and every incentive to pass every future shock straight down to the people least able to absorb it. The country’s only private power utility, and the government’s own hopes of privatising the sector nationwide, are both being tested in real time, and what is failing that test is not Karachi. It is the promise that the rules, once written, would hold. The third wound is the one that asks no questions and offers no hearings, because it has simply gone unanswered for years. Karachi’s industries are still owed Rs33 billion in Covid-era relief subsidy, money that was earmarked specifically for them, announced with the usual fanfare, and never disbursed. This is not a contested claim working its way through some tribunal. It is a promise that was made and then, quietly, allowed to be forgotten, while the same industries kept paying their taxes and kept filling the ships that carry the country’s exports out to sea. Set it beside the Rs28 billion FCA reversal and something ugly becomes visible. Money the regulator wants from Karachi moves with remarkable speed, backed by orders, deadlines, and recovery mechanisms. Money owed to Karachi sits in a drawer somewhere, unmentioned, un-indexed, and un-urgent. That asymmetry is not an accident of bureaucracy. It is a choice, repeated often enough to become a pattern, about whose claims are treated as real and whose are treated as noise. What makes all of this sadder than simple mismanagement is how ordinary the damage has become. Nobody is shocked anymore when a bill arrives higher than expected. Nobody expects the subsidy to actually come. The city has learned, the way people learn from repetition rather than argument, to stop believing the switch will turn back in its favour. And, a city that has stopped believing stops investing in its own future in ways that are difficult to reverse. Factories delay expansion. Families discourage their children from staying in a trade their father spent decades building. Foreign partners walk away before the deal is even signed. None of this shows up in a single tariff notification, but all of it traces back to the same source, a regulatory relationship built on retrospective punishment and unpaid promises rather than trust. Karachi does not need another announcement dressed up as generosity. It needs a sustainable and consistent policy that starts with a tariff that is worthy of a power utility this size. It needs to stay fixed once it is set, so a factory can plan a year without fearing a retrospective bill arriving eighteen months later. It needs the Rs28 billion FCA reversal decided and buried for good, not merely frozen behind a stay that could lift at any moment. It needs a four-year-old subsidy finally paid to the people it was always meant for. Until then, the lights over Karachi will keep flickering in a way no engineer can fix, because the failure was never really in the wires. It is in a system that keeps asking the city that carries the country to carry a little more, and calls it relief. Copyright Business Recorder, 2026

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