IT Ministry Tells NEPRA Telecom Sector Deserves Industrial Tariff, Not Commercial

The Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication has formally told the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on IT and Telecom that NEPRA should treat the telecom sector as an industry when supplying electricity, a status the sector has technically held since 2004 but has never actually received.

The written response was submitted after the committee asked the Ministry for its position in writing. In it, the Ministry argues that NEPRA should deal with telecom operators the way it deals with any other declared industrial sector, rather than continuing to bill them at commercial power rates.

A Status Granted, Then Ignored

The core of the dispute isn’t new. Pakistan classified telecom as an industry through a Ministry of Industries and Production notification in 2004. Twenty-two years later, that classification still hasn’t translated into industrial electricity tariffs for cellular towers and exchanges.

The Ministry’s submission points out a contrast that’s hard to explain away: poultry farms and buffalo dairy operations carry formal industry status, while telecom, a fully documented, tax-compliant sector, does not. Parliament reinforced the sector’s industrial standing again in 2021, when the Finance Act added telecom to the definition of “industrial undertaking” under the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001. The Ministry’s position is direct: NEPRA has no basis to keep disputing a classification that’s already been settled twice, in 2004 and again in 2021.

The Committee Has Summoned NEPRA

The Standing Committee isn’t treating this as a routine paperwork exchange. It has already summoned NEPRA officials to its next meeting specifically to explain why industrial tariffs haven’t been extended to telecom operators.

That’s consistent with how this fight has played out before. NEPRA rejected a formal petition from PTCL, Telenor, PTML, PMCL, and other operators in September 2022, arguing that “value addition,” the legal test for industrial tariff eligibility, applies to manufacturing and production, not telecom services. The Ministry’s current submission essentially reopens that argument in a legislative venue rather than a regulatory one, betting that pressure from the National Assembly can succeed where a NEPRA petition didn’t.

Power Cuts and the Express Feeder Question

Beyond the tariff dispute itself, the Ministry’s response raises a second, more immediate issue: load-shedding at telecom sites. When power supply to towers and exchanges is interrupted, service quality drops, and the Ministry specifically flags freelancers and a wide segment of ordinary users as the ones who feel it.

The proposed fix under discussion is allocating express feeders, the same uninterrupted power lines used for export-oriented industries, to telecom infrastructure. That would insulate towers and exchanges from scheduled outages regardless of how the broader tariff question is resolved.

What’s Actually at Stake

An industrial tariff would lower electricity costs for telecom companies, according to the Ministry’s own submission, a saving operators have been chasing since well before the 2022 NEPRA rejection. But the more interesting fight here isn’t really about kilowatt-hour pricing. It’s about whether a classification decision made by one arm of government in 2004, and reaffirmed by Parliament in 2021, can keep being sidestepped by a regulator that answers to a different ministry.

NEPRA’s 2022 reasoning rested on a narrow reading of “value addition” tied to physical manufacturing. That’s a defensible technical position for a power regulator working from tariff law. It’s a much harder position to hold once the Finance Act has already written telecom into the statutory definition of an industrial undertaking. The Ministry’s letter reads less like a fresh request and more like an attempt to close that gap by putting the disagreement directly in front of the body that can actually compel NEPRA to answer for it.

Whether the committee’s summons produces a different outcome than the 2022 petition did will say a lot about how much weight parliamentary pressure carries against a regulator that has already said no once, on the record.