He maintained that industrialists and workers are on the road to protest whole the year. Referring he said that growth of the Large Scale Manufacturing (LSM) was declined to 2.46 percent (July-October 2012) if compared with the corresponding period of year 2011.
He maintained that private sector is the engine of growth for the economy. Due to Government's heavily dependence on domestic borrowing from banking sector for its budgetary support, private sector is deprived of due to finance as Commercial Banks (CBs) are least interested to give loans to the industry having attractive rate of return from investing in Government Papers. He referred to the news items that Government is paying 60 percent of its tax revenue for debt serving and following no check and balance for borrowing which has increased to Rs 8.12 trillion from Rs 7.6 trillion from June to September 2012, in a period of four months.
He said that the industry and economy of the country have been worst hit in its history due to energy crisis during the year and no tangible steps have still been taken to add any considerable generation and supply to the systems and the matter of Circular Debt remained unresolved, forex reserves declined and country is again on the request for 'Stand-by Arrangement Loan from IMF. The weak financial position of the Government and losing trust of the foreign investors on Pakistani manufacturers added with discoursing investment conditions for local investors in the country resulted into severe loss to the economy.
Chamber Chief said that 80 percent of textile industry is located in Punjab and out of US $14 billion exports of textile, US $10 billion are originated from Punjab where Faisalabad contributes to US $4 billion per annum. With the suffering of the industry in Punjab, the whole industrial sector of the country has been paralysed. This has sent a wrong signal to the foreign buyers that Pakistani manufactures/exporters would not be able to fulfil the orders on time and we have lost many hard earned international markets for future exports, he added.
He said that the year 2012 was the crucial year where we could increase our exports but incurred heavy financial losses due to these factors of energy crisis, deteriorating law-and-order situation mainly. Only with improving economic conditions, he said, the revival of economy is possible to make up the time lost.