Some rural areas were still waiting to be reconnected.
Islamabad:
Power was returned to most cities across Pakistan on Tuesday, a day after the country of 220 million people was without power.
The outage began at 7:30 am (0230 GMT) on Monday, a failure linked to cost-cutting measures as Pakistan grapples with an economic crisis.
Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan said on Monday evening that power was being restored gradually.
Power returned to the major cities of Karachi and Lahore overnight, but a series of localized and brief outages continued.
The capital Islamabad and other cities including Rawalpindi, Quetta, Peshawar and Gujranwala also reported lights coming back on.
However, some rural areas were still waiting to be reunited.
The country’s power system is a complex and fragile web, where problems can spread quickly.
Khan said the outage was caused by frequency variations on the national grid, as power generation units were commissioned on Monday morning.
He had earlier told reporters that the units are temporarily shut down during winter nights to save fuel.
Local power cuts are common in Pakistan, and hospitals, factories and government institutions are often run by private generators. But the machines are beyond the means of most citizens and small businesses.
In parts of northern Pakistan, with natural gas supplies falling below freezing overnight temperatures – the most common heating method – also unreliable due to load-shedding.
– ‘Sitting idle’ –
With the economy already reeling from rampant inflation, a falling rupee and critically low foreign exchange reserves, power cuts are putting additional pressure on small businesses.
In Rawalpindi’s Garrison city, homewares merchant Muhammad Iftikhar Shaikh, 71, said he was unable to showcase electronic products to browsing patrons.
“Customers never buy without testing first,” he said. “We are all sitting idle.”
Schools remained mostly either in the dark or using battery-powered lighting.
A shop owner in the southern port city of Karachi, where temperatures were high, told AFP he feared his entire dairy stock would spoil without refrigeration.
Printer Khurram Khan, 39, said orders were piling up because of the blackout.
Unrelenting power is “an enduring curse that our governments have failed to overcome”, he said.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority tweeted that mobile phone services were also disrupted due to the fault.
A similar fault affected the entire country in January 2021, after a fault in southern Pakistan tripped the national broadcasting system.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
featured video of the day
Watch: SpiceJet passenger offloaded after misbehaving with crew