The Lota, the Broom, and the Economic Survey 2026: An Inquest into Pakistan’s Industrial Ruin

There is a shop near my home. You will find one near yours too — a small, fluorescent-lit storehouse of the modern economy where everything costs a dollar, and the shelves carry the quiet testimony of a nation’s industrial failure. I walk in sometimes, not to buy, but to grieve. Hundreds of items stare back at me: kitchen gadgets, extension cords, children’s toys, decorative lights, combs, clips, and curiosities. I pick them up one by one and turn them over. Made in China. Made in China. Made in China. I search the entire shop for the fingerprint of my own country and find exactly three products. A PLASTIC SHOPPING BAG. A LOTA. A BROOM. That is what Pakistani industry has been reduced to — three items on a shelf — and the tragedy is that even this is not an exaggeration. It is an inventory.

The Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26 was released recently with the careful, clinical language that official documents always use to describe catastrophe without calling it by name. It informs us that manufacturing grew by 6.6 % in FY 2026, that Large-Scale Manufacturing rebounded by 6.5 %, and that 16 of 22 industrial groups recorded positive growth during July-March FY 2026. These numbers are presented with restrained optimism, as though a patient who nearly died is being celebrated for learning to sit up in bed. What the Survey does not say loudly enough — what it buries in tables and footnotes — is where this patient has come from, and how much has already been lost in the years of suffering that brought us here.

Let us speak first of gas, because gas is where the story truly begins. Industrial gas consumption in Pakistan reached its peak in FY 2011-12, when the nation’s factories consumed 296,181 million cubic feet. That number represents an economy with functioning lungs, an industry that breathed and produced. By FY 2024-25, that figure had collapsed to 177,755 million cubic feet. In thirteen years, Pakistan’s industrial gas consumption fell by nearly 40 %. Not because the world stopped needing products. Not because Pakistani workers became less capable. But because the gas stopped arriving at prices that made production possible, and factory after factory shuttered or limped forward at fractions of its capacity.

Then there is electricity, which tells the same story in a different dialect of ruin. Industrial electricity consumption climbed from 21,207 million units in FY 2010-11 to its peak of 31,600 million units in FY 2021-22 — a number that already reflected an industry running below its true potential. What followed was not a correction. It was a collapse. Consumption fell to 31,138 million units in FY 2022-23, then crashed to 27,830 million units in FY 2023-24, before a partial recovery to 29,181 million units in FY 2024-25. In just two years, Pakistani industry shed the electricity equivalent of powering a mid-sized economy. The factories did not go dark because demand disappeared. They went dark because the cost of electricity became a weapon pointed at the heart of production itself.

The Economic Survey gives us the granular detail of what happened inside this broader collapse, and it deserves to be read without the comfort of optimism. The chemicals sector contracted by 1.4 %. Pharmaceuticals — the sector that makes the medicines of a nation of 260 million — contracted by 5.1 %. Iron and steel contracted by 6.3 %, and the response was not revival but surrender: iron and steel imports grew by 10.5 % in quantity terms during the same period, as though Pakistan had quietly accepted that it would consume what others make. Textile growth, the last great pillar of Pakistani manufacturing at 59.7 % of all national exports, inched forward at a barely visible 0.7 %. Even total textile and apparel exports declined marginally, from $13.66 billion to $13.58 billion. Cotton cloth exports fell by 10.9 %. Carpets fell by 12.9 %. The Production Index of Manufacturing, with base year 2015-16 at 100, reached only 123.03 by July-March FY 2026 — while the Mining Production Index in the same period reached 150.2. Pakistan is becoming more of an extraction economy and less of a making economy, more of a nation that digs raw material from the ground and ships it out unprocessed, and less of one that transforms labour and resource into the finished value that builds prosperity.

Yes, there are bright spots. Automobiles grew 61.7 %. Sugar production surged 31 %. The football sector grew 23.1 % for the FIFA World Cup 2026. Cement despatches rose 9.7 %. These are real, and they are welcome. But they cannot paper over a structural deterioration that has been accumulating for over a decade, and they cannot explain why the shelves of every Dollar-One shop in this country are a monument to someone else’s manufacturing.

Those shelves were not built by accident. They were built by energy policy — specifically, by the most consequential and most costly energy misjudgement in the history of this republic.

Beginning in 2014, Pakistan embarked on a large-scale LNG-based energy initiative that Dr Farrukh Saleem has documented and named, with surgical precision, a fifty-billion-dollar blunder. The architecture of this disaster included four major RLNG power plants. And at its most ruinous heart, it included two long-term sovereign Take-or-Pay LNG contracts with Qatar — the first in 2016 for 3.75 million tonnes per annum at 13.37 % of Brent for fifteen years, and the second in 2021 for 3 million tonnes per annum at 10.2 % of Brent for ten years — representing a combined financial commitment that Dr Saleem estimates between $26 billion and $40 billion. Total the figures and you arrive, conservatively, at fifty billion dollars committed, contracted, and locked in — without demand guarantees, without anticipation of global LNG price volatility, and without the foresight to align supply with the actual absorption capacity of a struggling industrial economy.

The consequence was not energy security. The consequence was the most expensive electricity in the region, delivered through the costliest infrastructure, burning the most expensively procured fuel, into a grid that industry could no longer afford to use. The gas consumption numbers tell you what happened next. The electricity consumption curve shows you where the factories went. The Dollar-One shelf shows you who filled the void.

And here, THE TRAGEDY REACHES ITS MOST BITTER CHAPTER. THE ARCHITECT OF THIS FIFTY-BILLION-DOLLAR ENERGY FRAMEWORK — THE MAN WHO SIGNED THE CONTRACTS, CELEBRATED THE TERMINALS, INAUGURATED THE POWER PLANTS, AND BUILT THE PIPELINE OF DEBT AND OBLIGATION THAT STRANGLED PAKISTANI INDUSTRY’S ABILITY TO COMPETE — IS TODAY A FAMILIAR FACE ON OUR TELEVISION SCREENS. He appears on budget programs and economic panels, offering his diagnosis of Pakistan’s GDP decline, lamenting the fall in industrial output, and prescribing remedies for the very disease he introduced into the body of this economy. He speaks with the authority of experience. He is not wrong that Pakistan is in trouble. He simply never mentions that he is the reason why.

Three items. A plastic bag, a lota, and a broom. That is what remains of Pakistani industry on the Dollar-One shelf. The gas meter fell 40 %. The electricity ledger bled. Fifty billion dollars were committed to making energy unaffordable. And the man who did it is on television tonight, explaining why the economy is struggling.

Pakistan deserves better than this. Its 260 million people — its workers, its factory hands, its young engineers with nowhere to apply their knowledge — deserve an honest reckoning. The shelves do not lie. The numbers do not lie. And history, when it is finally written without courtesy, will not lie either.