Some 46,500 Pakistanis have been employed so far at the energy projects of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The CPEC power plants have performed commendably in raising overall direct local employment throughout Pakistan, said a report titled "Overview of Pakistan's Power Sector and its Future Outlook" recently published by China Three Gorges International.

It said all the CPEC power plants had been installed under the government policy 2002 and 2015, and Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB) Policy 2006 and 2019, as Independent Power Producers was purely Foreign Direct Investment. All equity and private debt had been arranged by respective project companies.

These plants' total investments (equity plus private debt) had been arranged in US dollars and directly transferred by Chinese banks - China EXIM Bank, China Development Bank, etc. to Pakistan, the report said.

The coal-based CPEC projects were based on super-critical coal technology. The prevailing engineering graduate skill-set was insufficient to meet the requirements for technical personnel, so Chinese management began focusing on the employment of graduates from specific universities in Pakistan, it added.

The first batches were completely hired from the NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, and the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) Islamabad. Some 600 young and dynamic engineers were selected and sent to China for six-month technical and management training. They returned to the project site after finishing training sessions to take charge of important operation work, it added.

The engineering employees were sent to China for technical training to complete a module programme specifically designed for the operational phase of those power plants. Currently, foreign workers were mostly employed in the maintenance department and had an exit window from the Pakistani workforce market of three years, the report added.

It said as per the vision and direction of the company’s leadership, the share of the Pakistani workforce would increase to 80% from the current 68% within the next five years. Moreover, plants would be completely operated by the Pakistani workforce in the next decade.

It was evident from the survey that the foreign workers employed in that phase would return to their country in 5 to 10 years. This was due to the length of their contracts and continuous human resource development as practised on the site itself, the report said.

Keeping that in mind, an advantageous approach was adopted to hire the workforce in that phase consisting of a policy requiring that all domestic workers were freshly-qualified engineers from numerous engineering universities within Pakistan.

In addition, new advanced technical training institutes were planned to open within the premises to provide technical training free of charge to domestic workers e.g. collaboration of China Three Gorges South Asia Investment Ltd with the local government for the establishment of a technical training school for locals.

To meet the technical manpower requirements of the Karot Hydropower Project (HPP), the company selected local students and awarded them an opportunity to undertake electrical engineering degrees under a well-thought international scholarship programme. The students who completed their degrees had been provided with jobs at Karot HPP, the report added.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk