The recent hike in the power tariff under the head of fuel price adjustment is forcing the marble industry of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) to halt its production.
The Buner Marble Association (BMA) on February 1, announced to go on a strike, demanding withdrawal of the additional taxes and fuel price adjustment charges in the power utility bill.
According to the association, there are more than 4,000 marble factories in the province, including 44 in Swat and around 500 in Buner. There are up to one million workers associated with the industry.
The association after staging a protest for around three weeks temporarily ended the strike and decided to start load-in and load-out of the products present at the factories.
The factories, which process raw materials to produce the end products mostly rely on the Peshawar Electric Supply Company (Pesco) for power, while the electricity bill accounts for around 30 per cent of these factories’ cost of production, which has now gone up to around 45 per cent, according to an official of the Buner Marble Association.
A report of the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) showed that there are 160 million tonnes of marble reserves in the country, of which 158 million tonnes are in KP alone, while around half of the marble reserves of KP are in Buner district.
Buner district currently houses 350 marble factories and contributes 60 per cent to the total marble production in the country. However, despite such a large quantum of production, the district lacks an industrial zone, which leads to lower production levels and harm the environment.
At present, marble factories are able to run their operations for around eight hours in a day due to prolonged electricity outages, which reduces marble supply and leads to unemployment.
However, the marble factories located in the industrial estates can be operational 24 hours, which is expected to increase the supply and create additional jobs.
Source: www.bolnews.com
