The White Elephant in the Dark: How CPPA-G and NEPRA Betrayed a Nation

There is a particular kind of grief reserved for wounds a nation inflicts on itself, and Pakistan’s power sector deserves that grief more than almost anything else in its modern history. In 2015, the circular debt strangling the sector stood at roughly Rs. 633 billion — already a wound, already a warning. A decade later, that same wound has metastasized into something close to Rs. 2.6 trillion, with independent estimates placing the true figure even higher once hidden arrears and deferred payments are counted. Somewhere in that widening chasm of debt, Pakistan quietly became what it always feared becoming: a nation that cannot keep its own lights on without asking the world for money, a begging bowl held out not because the country is poor in resources, but because it is rich in mismanagement.

It would almost be bearable if this were simply misfortune — bad luck, bad weather, bad markets. It is not. It is the predictable, foreseeable result of a decision Pakistan made to itself in 2015, when it created the Central Power Purchasing Agency (Guarantee) Limited, CPPA-G, and handed it the job that the National Transmission and Dispatch Company had already been doing. Nobody has ever offered a convincing account of what problem CPPA-G was created to solve. What is not in dispute is what happened after it was created: the circular debt did not shrink; it grew. The inefficiencies did not disappear; they multiplied. Transmission and distribution losses that were supposed to fall instead rose past 18 percent, blowing through every benchmark the regulator itself had set. And still, year after year, the organization survived, insulated from consequence, insulated from the debt it was supposedly built to manage.

This is the part that should make every Pakistani weep, not with anger alone but with something closer to mourning: while circular debt swelled past Rs. 2.3 trillion, while DISCOs bled hundreds of billions in a single year through theft and technical losses NEPRA itself documented, the very regulator charged with disciplining this sector chose, instead, to approve salary increases, bonuses, and performance increments for CPPA-G’s employees for the 2025-26 fiscal year. Performance increments — the words themselves feel like a cruelty when read against the backdrop of a sector in ruins. What performance is being rewarded? Whose diligence is being honoured? A country drowning in debt it cannot repay found the money, and the will, to give bonuses to the people who failed to stop it from drowning. Nowhere else on earth does failure wear this many medals.

And NEPRA — the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority, meant to be the conscience and the discipline of this entire system — has itself become part of the wreckage it was meant to prevent. An organization that cannot enforce its own loss targets, cannot compel recovery, cannot hold a single institution accountable for a debt burden now measured in trillions, is not a regulator in any meaningful sense. It is a formality. A rubber stamp. A monument to the idea that in Pakistan, oversight exists mostly on paper, mostly for show, while the real decisions are made elsewhere, by people who will never personally answer for them.

Read CPPA-G’s own stated values, and the tragedy sharpens into something almost unbearable. The organisation describes itself as dedicated to the highest standards of integrity and accountability, to transparent and non-discriminatory practice. Set those words beside a circular debt that has grown more than fourfold since the agency’s creation, and the sentence stops sounding like a mission statement and starts sounding like satire written by the wound itself. If a genuine forensic audit were ever conducted into how this debt accumulated on CPPA-G’s watch, and into how NEPRA allowed it to happen without consequence, the findings would not read as bureaucratic failure. They would read it as betrayal. Four wars with a hostile neighbour and barbaric TTP  have not managed to damage this country’s economic sinews as thoroughly, or as patiently, as this one organisation has, and the people responsible have not lost so much as a promotion for it.

This is the nation’s real failure — not a failure of resources, or geography, or even of money, but a failure of consequence. Pakistan has built, in CPPA-G, the perfect real-world proof of a theory every economist already knows: that an institution shielded from the cost of its own failure will fail forever, comfortably, and be paid more each year for doing so. Perhaps that is the saddest sentence anyone can write about this country’s power sector — not that it collapsed, but that it was allowed to, gently, with bonuses attached.

So, the question that should keep the nation awake is not technical. It is not about tariffs or transmission losses or capacity payments, though all of those matter. It is simpler and far more painful: who, in this country, will finally have the courage to slay this white elephant? Until someone does, Pakistan will keep paying — in debt, in darkness, in dignity — for an institution that was never asked to answer for anything at all.