KARACHI: Young engineers from Karachi say their award-winning invention will help cut Pakistan's carbon footprint and reduce electricity consumption in homes by up to 20 percent.
Patented as Intellica-Three-Phase Load Balancer, the device was one of nine winners of the 2020 Asia-Pacific Low Carbon Lifestyles Challenge organized by the United Nations Environment Program in May. It is developed by ENENT, a startup founded by a team of recent electrical engineering graduates from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Karachi.
"There is a huge gap between supply and demand (in Pakistan), we believe that this load-balancing technology can play its part in making this band narrow, as up to 18 to 20 percent line losses can be reduced if we balance the load among the three phases in real time and that is what Intellica is doing," Osama bin Shakeel, chief executive of ENENT, told Arab News on Friday.
According to Pakistan's Economic Survey 2019-20, installed electricity generation capacity reached 37,402 MW in 2020, while the country's total demand is 25,000 MW. Huge losses in transmission result in massive power outages, which are notorious in the megacity and commercial hub of Karachi. Intellica is expected to partly help address the problem.
Shakeel's estimates suggest that by installing Intellica at 1,000 homes, 18,000 ton of carbon dioxide less would be emitted and $500,000 would be saved in electricity bills every year.
"The saved energy can be used to power additional 200 homes," he said, adding that the cost of the device and its installation is $350. The cost pays off after seven-eight months of use.
While the device has already undergone a 3,000-hour reliability test and ENENT is looking for funds to start mass production, energy experts say that although the concept is good, still more laboratory tests are needed before it enters the market.
"I principally agree that with load balancing less current goes into the meter and the losses decease whereas the life of products also enhances due to the flow of sustained load," Asad Mahmood, energy efficiency and renewable energy expert in Islamabad, told Arab News.
"Conceptually, the product is good," he said, but besides more tests also before-and-after analysis is needed.
Another expert Hira Wajahat, who is Pakistan's national lead of ClimateLaunchpad and has analyzed the device, says that Intellica initial test shows that it will help households save money and have a positive impact on the environment.
“In the lab test, the device has done wonderfully and now they are in second phase where external labs and certification bodies are testing it so the claim will definitely be verified,” she said.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Foreign Office said on Thursday it was reviewing a proposal from the business community to resume trade with India.
Pakistan downgraded its diplomatic relations and suspended bilateral trade with India after New Delhi’s revocation of the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019.
The geopolitical rift between the two countries has since impacted businesses on both sides who previously benefited from cross-border trade in textiles, agricultural products and medical supplies.
Speaking at a weekly press briefing, Foreign Office spokesperson referred to a statement by Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and said the business community had expressed in review of trade with India.
“Examination of such proposals is a regular exercise in the Government of Pakistan, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where we continue to consider all such requests and assess our policy,” she said.
Baloch, however, clarified that there was no change in Pakistan’s position at present.
The Muslim-majority Himalayan region of Kashmir has been a flashpoint between Pakistan and India since their independence from the British rule in 1947.
Both countries rule parts of the Himalayan territory, but claim it in full and have fought three wars over the disputed region.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Thursday his government was working to modernize the country’s revenue collection system to revive the frail $350 billion South Asian economy, describing it as “top priority” of his administration.
Pakistan, which has been facing an economic meltdown, is making efforts to introduce structural reforms under a $3 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) program that helped it avert a sovereign default last year.
The country this month cleared second and final review of its $3 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) program which would pave the way for the release of $1.1 billion after helping Islamabad avert a default in last June.
Islamabad has expressed its interest in securing a new loan under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) program with the IMF, which is expected to come with fiscal tightening measures, including an increase in revenue.
“A plan is underway to modernize revenue collection system,” PM Sharif was quoted as saying by the state-run Radio Pakistan broadcaster.
“The Federal Board of Revenue is being fully digitized and efforts are afoot to increase the tax base.”
He said a “whole-of-government approach” was being adopted to check power theft that was worth billions of rupees, according to the report.
Privatization of government-owned enterprises, institutional reforms, internal and external investment and austerity were also the government’s priorities in this regard, he added.
LAHORE: For Saad Mehmood, it was a routine visit to a mosque in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore for Friday prayers in 2017 when the then 22-year-old stumbled upon a store room with sheaves of paper stored carefully on a shelf.
The worn pages were fragments from everyday copies of the Qur’an, which were awaiting ritual disposal. In Pakistan, pages of the holy book that are disposed are often called shaheed, or martyred, copies.
In Islam, widely accepted methods of disposing worn pages of the holy book are to wrap them in a cloth and bury them, ideally in a mosque, or to burn them respectfully.
But Mehmood, at the time a final year student of fine arts at the Beaconhouse National University (BNU), was inspired by the worn copies and decided to restore them as part of his thesis.
“Saad asked for some of these pages that were torn or worn out, and started to restore the ordinary, mass-printed sheets with gold paper and the finest ink — bringing that which was ‘martyred’ back to life,” the artist’s statement accompanying an ongoing exhibition of his works in Lahore reads.
The effort is “an act of artistic devotion,” Mehmood told Arab News at the exhibition last week, saying all his work now revolved around restoring the holy pages and turning them into artforms.
“This work started in 2017,” Mehmood, now a 28-year-old visual artist, said. “I collect the pages of the Qur’an that are shaheed, then there’s an entire process to their restoration, I fill in the damaged parts so that the pages are readable again.”
Mehmood said he had done extensive research on damaged Qur’anic pages and what happened to them and where they went from storerooms of mosques and homes.
“I saw that they’re buried in graveyards, or floated in clean and flowing water. Sometimes, I even saw the pages being burned and their ashes buried in some corner of a graveyard,” he explained.
This got Mehmood thinking: instead of disposing of the sacred texts, he could restore them.
The process of restoration was a difficult one, as many Qur’an pages Mehmood came across had no references.
“When we open these [Qur’anic] collections… there are [some] smaller pages which don’t have any references [which ayat, surah, what page number],” he said. “So, this was a conundrum… how do I restore them when there’s no reference to work with?“
Mehmood decided to make a collage of such pages.
“So, at least they are still visible, still accessible,” he said. “So, we don’t accidentally disrespect the words, they will remain in front of our eyes, and then turn them into art to be appreciated.”
Mehmood has also visited multiple religious scholars to present his idea and his work.
“There are a lot of organizations in Pakistan like Tahaffuz-e-Auraq [who dispose of pages in the prescribed manner],” Mehmood said. “I restored them and then I started showing people that basically this is the work I’m doing.”
The idea found wide acceptability, he said. “GOLD LEAF”
The ongoing exhibition in Lahore, organized by the Pakistan Art Forum, includes collages of restored Qur’anic fragments, concentric circles around Islamic calligraphy, decorative additions like gold leaves, and paintings with Arabic diacritics on Vasli and white paper. And this is all by design.
Mehmood said he wants to further explore this Islamic art form and create something new, like his painting of the diacritics without any words, or of punctuation marks without any sentences.
“The Qur’an came to us from Arabia, and the diacritics were added later, so that non-native Arabic speakers [Ajmi] could understand the text,” he said. “[Helping] in how to pronounce and enunciate it, zeir, zabr, that is also something I’ve worked on, and will continue to work on.”
There is also a reason why Mehmood uses gold leaf so often.
“When you look at my work… I have used gold leaf on the shaheed [damaged] Qur’anic pages,” he said.
“I used that gold leaf specifically and consciously, because gold is considered a divine material. And where the words are missing, pages torn, I’ve also used gold leaf to show the preciousness of the lost words, using a precious material.” “EXPAND WAYS TO EXPERIENCE QUR’AN”
The visual artist has held a number of group exhibitions at the Alhamra Arts Center in Lahore and Sanat Gallery in the southern port city of Karachi. Last week, he held his second solo show in Lahore, titled Al-Qadr, referring to the night when Muslims believe the Qur’an was first revealed.
While most of the visitors to the Lahore exhibition said they had come out of curiosity, they left with admiration for the intricate work and beautiful calligraphy or collage technique that Mehmood uses.
“Calligraphy is a part of [what I do], but this is something else [entirely],” he explained. “You can call it a collage. You can call it an installation. You can call it painting, you can call it artwork.”
Shahid Rassam, a famous Pakistani painter and sculptor, described Mehmood work as “positive,” saying he had seen other works, though rare, in which worn Qur’an pages were restored as a form of art.
Rassam, who has himself made contemporary forms of the Qur’an, including one in which he used metal engravings, said it was “vital to expand the ways in which we experience the sacred text, even as art installations.”
“I think what this young man [Saad Mehmood] is doing is objectively a positive thing,” the artist said. “He’s taking sacred pages and giving them their rightful respect, instead of just letting them lie in poorly-kept stores and boxes.”
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Foreign Office said on Thursday that a suicide attack that killed five Chinese nationals this week would not impact the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and other projects.
Five Chinese nationals and their Pakistan driver were killed on Tuesday in Shangla, located in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, when a bomber rammed his explosive-laden car into their vehicle.
The attack occurred in an area vital to CPEC, which encompasses various mega projects crucial for Pakistan’s economy, and the victims were en route to Dasu Dam, Pakistan’s largest hydropower project.
Speaking at a weekly briefing in Islamabad, Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said Pakistan would not let anyone sabotage Pakistan-China cooperation and such attempts would never succeed.
“Pakistan and China are close friends and brothers and we will continue to work together to develop CPEC and to promote our cooperation,” she said.
Beijing is investing over $65 billion in energy and infrastructure projects in Pakistan as part of CPEC, a major segment of Beijing’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, which will connect China to the Arabian Sea and help Islamabad expand and modernize its economy through a network of roads, railways, pipelines and ports in Pakistan.
Hundreds of Chinese engineers and technicians have been working on these projects, primarily in Pakistan’s northwest and southwest.
Tuesday’s attack came less than a week after Pakistani security forces killed eight Balochistan Liberation Army separatists who opened fire on a convoy carrying Chinese citizens outside the Chinese-funded Gwadar port in the volatile southwestern Balochistan province.
Baloch referred to a statement of the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson in which they said that no attempts to sabotage Pakistan-China cooperation would ever succeed.
“This is a reflection of the depth of this relationship and the understanding both countries have that those entities which could be behind such a dastardly attack are attempting to sabotage CPEC and target the symbols of Pakistan-China cooperation,” she said.
“Our message to them is they will not succeed and we will work together to bring the culprits of this attack to justice and to ensure that CPEC and all projects of Pakistan-China cooperation, including the hydropower projects in Pakistan, will continue forward without hindrance.”
Also on Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said his government believed Islamabad would hold accountable the perpetrators of the deadly attack, vowing that Beijing was ready to step up cooperation with the international community against militancy.
“The Pakistani side is working intensively to investigate and handle the aftermath and has taken concrete steps to enhance security for Chinese personnel, projects and institutions,” Lin told reporters during a press briefing.
“We believe Pakistan will get to the bottom of the attack and bring the perpetrators to justice as soon as possible.”
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal and Iran’s Ambassador to Pakistan Dr. Raza Amiri Moghaddam on Thursday agreed to strengthen bilateral relations between their countries to reduce militancy in the region, state-run media reported.
Pakistan and Iran are often at odds with each other over instability on their shared border. Both countries have routinely blamed each other for not rooting out militancy. Small separatist groups in Pakistan have been behind a long-running insurgency, calling for gas and oil-rich Balochistan’s independence from the central government in Islamabad.
Pakistani anti-Iran militants have also targeted the Iranian border in recent years, increasing friction between the countries.
“Pakistan and Iran have agreed to strengthen bilateral relations to reduce tendencies of terrorism and extremism in the region,” the state-run Radio Pakistan said.
Radio Pakistan said the agreement to bolster bilateral ties was reached between Moghaddam and Iqbal during a meeting in Islamabad.
“The Planning Minister emphasized the importance of enhancing connectivity through trade routes, considering the 900-kilometer shared land and maritime border,” he said.
Tensions reached a head in January between Pakistan and Iran after they exchanged airstrikes against alleged militant targets in each other’s territories. Both countries since then have made efforts to ease tensions and promote bilateral trade with each other.