Power by the people

Sometime in the last three years, without a scheme, a subsidy, a launch ceremony or a minister to cut a ribbon, Pakistanis wired their own country, one roof at a time.

By early this year, Pakistan had brought in about 54 gigawatts of solar panels, making it the second-largest buyer of Chinese panels on earth, behind only the port that supplies all of Europe. By the summer of 2025, solar had become the country's single largest source of electricity, supplying close to a quarter of what it used in the hottest months. The change is visible from space, and if you compare satellite images of any city here in 2021 against today, you can watch the rooftops turn dark blue.

There was no government rooftop programme, no feed-in tariff, and no national target to hit. Instead, electricity became so expensive that in many homes the bill ran higher than the rent, the grid kept failing anyway, and Chinese panels got cheap enough to buy, so people bought them. A shopkeeper puts two panels on his roof and lashes them down with wire, a farmer swaps out a diesel pump that was eating his margins, a family pools money with a cousin and splits the cost of an inverter, and if you multiply that by a few million households you end up with the kind of energy transition that other countries have spent a decade and most of a treasury trying to engineer.

It bought the country insurance that nobody knew it was buying. With the Gulf in flames and Hormuz a daily worry, Pakistan is far less exposed than it would otherwise have been, because those rooftops had already cut more than twelve billion dollars off the oil and gas import bill by February. No committee sat down and hedged that risk. Several million households did it accidentally, while trying to keep their fans running.

Then, in February, Nepra scrapped the old net metering rules and replaced them with net billing, under which a household now sells its surplus power to the grid at around eleven rupees a unit and buys power back at up to fifty. The official reasoning isn't crazy when you read it in isolation -- something about cross subsidies and the strain on distribution companies -- and there is a real problem underneath it, since the grid does lose its best-paying customers as they leave. But strip away the language and the message that reaches an ordinary household is simple enough. Citizens solved a problem the state could not, and the state responded by making solving it less worthwhile.

What makes this worth getting angry about is who exactly was punished, because it was not the people who talk about this country at dinner parties.

At that table the country comes up the way a bad job comes up, as something to be endured until the exit has been arranged, and the verdict is always that everything is broken and nothing here will ever work. It is a comfortable verdict, and it is usually delivered by the people who got the most out of Pakistan in the first place, having taken cheap seats at colleges the public paid for, degrees that opened doors, jobs, contacts and the option to leave whenever the mood takes them. The people most fluent in this country's failures are usually the ones this country educated.

The trouble with that verdict is not that it is disloyal. The trouble is that it is factually wrong, and the roofs are the proof. While everything was supposedly broken, several million households without much money and without any help rebuilt the electricity supply of a country of 240 million people. They did it with their own savings, at their own risk, in a policy vacuum. Whatever you want to call that, it is not a population that has given up.

None of which is an argument against criticism, and it would be a strange argument to make in a newspaper, since a column that cannot attack the state is just propaganda. It is an argument about where the criticism should be pointed. Net billing deserves attacking, as does a power sector that has spent two decades protecting its own inefficiency by charging households for it, and as does every distribution company that lost its customers because it could not keep the lights on and now wants those customers back on worse terms.

All of which brings us to ‘jugaar’, a word that has been praised into meaninglessness by people who have never had to depend on it. Jugaar is a receipt, and every act of it records an institution that failed predictably, in a way everyone saw coming. Fifty-four gigawatts is an extraordinary achievement and an extraordinary indictment at the same time, because that is what a population has to do when the grid it has been paying for cannot keep it supplied.

The right response to that is not applause; it is to stop making it harder. Reversing the worst of net billing would be a start, as would building a grid worth connecting to, since those roofs have proved that the raw material of a serious country has been sitting here the whole time, waiting for somebody to stop getting in its way.

The writer is a non-resident fellow at the Consortium for Asia Pacific & Eurasian Studies. He tweets/posts @umarwrites