Khan

On behalf of their client, Zara Sultana, Bindmans Media and Information Law Practise Group requires that I publish the following statement on X, and that such statement must be clearly visible and pinned to my profile for a continuous period of no less than 24 hours: “On 30 March 2026, I published a post on my X account addressed to Zarah Sultana in which I stated that she encourages and incites violence and is friends with terrorists. Those statements are false. I was wrong and offer my sincere apologies to Ms Sultana for the harm and distress caused to her.” It is my very great pleasure to do this, and I reiterate my sincere and repeated offer to meet with Miss Zara Sultana in person to resolve our differences.

This is the view from Hindukush heights in Chitral. Graced by the likes of Diana, Robert de Niro and countless polo champions. The hotel looks over a beautiful valley, but also the chitral airport. Which costs the government of KPK eight million a rupees to keep functional every month. Flights from islamabad to here would take one hour. The airport used to have five flights a day from across the country. Then it had one a day. Then it had a flight a week. For the past three years there are no flights because PIA doesn’t have the money for proper small aircraft. So it takes a 12 hour bus journey across mountain roads to get here.

Instead of strengthening the grid and building on the momentum of private investment in solar that Pakistan’s net metering policy had unlocked, the government went into overdrive to kill it. A rigid, outdated bureaucratic mindset couldn’t see beyond protecting an inefficient power system. The objective seemed less about enabling affordable, clean $30 energy alternatives, and more about maintaining a broken energy economy.

Petrol at Rs 30/litre in Pakistan sounds crazy. It is not. What is crazy is the policy failure that prevents it. Petrol is around Rs 300/litre today, excluding government levy, here's how it can effectively be Rs 30/litre. People do not consume petrol for its own sake; they use it to travel. The average Pakistani rides a motorbike. A fuel-efficient motorbike can travel about 60 km on one litre. An efficient electric scooter can travel about 30 km per kWh, so it needs only 2 kWh to cover the same 60 km. What should 2 kWh cost in Pakistan? Pakistan is one of the best places in the world for solar, with an all-in LCOE cost of around 5 cents per kWh. The electricity cost is 10 cents, or Rs 30/litre of distance travelled! The Rs 30/litre calculation remains the same for cars. The 300-versus-30 gap is the cost of bad policy. It reflects billions of dollars of saving that could instead finance EV infrastructure: charging, distribution, battery swapping, and smart pricing software etc. - boosting much-needed domestic investment. Since solar is highly modular. You do not need massive scale to get reasonable efficiency. That creates business and employment opportunities for small domestic power producers. Instead, Pakistan leaned into large fossil-fuel plants financed by dollar-denominated borrowing and guaranteed returns. Local firms face credit constraints, but solar creates a natural collateralizable cash flow through electricity sales to the grid. With the right regulatory framework, this could have unlocked large private domestic investment, and employment. Battery swapping is another area where small local businesses could have emerged and scaled. Electricity enables smart pricing. When solar supply is abundant, prices can fall, and poor households and firms can shift usage to cheaper hours - automatic demand stabilization Better air quality would mean longer, healthier lives and higher productivity. That is a growth multiplier Green technology industries could be developed domestically with the right industrial policy, easing balance-of-payments pressure while raising employment and investment. Instead, Pakistan chose imported-fuel power plants, protected a backward-looking domestic auto sector, and raised electricity prices by burdening them with the fixed costs of those plants and heavy taxation, slowing EV adoption. Then came the net-metering fiasco, all to keep zombie power plants alive. Pakistan’s energy policy may be the clearest example of a broken nervous system. I hope someone fixes it, because people are paying the price, 300-versus-30