🔲 Public Investigative Series | Episode 21

Title: How Pakistan’s Power Sector Can Be Fixed

Topic: The Reality Behind the Lahore High Court Decision on Free Electricity

🔺 When institutions withhold facts, it becomes the responsibility of the public to uncover the truth

Research and Writing: Syed Shayan

In recent days, a decision regarding free electricity for employees of the power sector has been presented in an unusually exaggerated manner. In April 2026, Justice Malik Javed Iqbal Wains of the Lahore High Court dismissed a petition and made it clear that free electricity is not a legal or permanent service right, but rather an administrative facility that the government may modify under financial reforms.

However, the way the government, the Power Division, and the media are presenting this matter creates the impression that a major financial burden on the electricity sector has been reduced, whereas the reality is quite different.

In fact, this matter came before the Lahore High Court as Writ Petition No. 171 of 2024, in which the GEPCO Engineers and Officers Association challenged the Ministry of Energy’s notification dated December 5, 2023. The court dismissed the petition and upheld the government’s decision, under which the free electricity provided to officers in Grade 17 and above was not abolished but monetized.

In other words, instead of free electricity units, a fixed monetary amount has been added to their salaries, and these officers are now required to pay electricity bills like ordinary consumers.

Let us now examine what the situation of free electricity in Pakistan’s power sector looks like after this decision.

Employees of Pakistan’s power sector institutions, including WAPDA, distribution companies (DISCOs), generation companies (GENCOs), National Transmission and Dispatch Company, and the Power Information Technology Company (PITC), continue to receive free electricity according to their grade.

Distribution of free electricity by grade:

• Grade 1 to 4: 100 units per month (300 units in generation companies)

• Grade 5 to 10: 150 units per month (600 units in generation companies)

• Grade 16: 300 units per month (600 units in generation companies)

• Grade 17: 450 units per month (650 units in generation companies)

• Grade 18: 600 units per month (700 units in generation companies)

• Grade 19: 880 units per month (1000 units in generation companies)

• Grade 20: 1100 units per month

• Grade 21: 1300 units per month

According to available data, 15,971 officers in Grades 17 to 21 consume approximately 7 million units of free electricity per month, while 173,200 employees in Grades 1 to 16 consume over 33 million units per month.

🔲 Has the burden really decreased?

Let us understand this in a simpler way. After the Lahore High Court decision, the approximately 7 million units per month that were being provided free to officers have now been replaced with a monetary equivalent, meaning that this benefit has been monetized rather than eliminated.

At the same time, the free electricity provided to the rest of the power sector employees continues unchanged, amounting to approximately 27 to 33 million units per month.

If we analyze this on an annual basis, this decision results in a reduction of approximately 84 million units per year, whereas approximately 320 to 400 million units of free electricity will continue to be provided in the same manner.

In other words, there has been a reduction of roughly 15 to 20 percent, while approximately 80 to 85 percent of free electricity remains intact.

To understand how much benefit this decision brings to an ordinary citizen, consider this example: if a person is carrying a heavy bucket of water and complains that it is difficult to walk because of its weight, and you remove just a couple of scoops of water before handing it back and telling them that the problem has been solved, then clearly the difficulty has not truly been resolved, because the bucket is still almost as heavy as before.