Thar A prosperous treasure

[Music]

in the next 18 minutes

i will be talking about a

subject or topic which seemingly

makes a lot of sense but if you look

around

it’s not very common so i’ll be talking

about

sustainability and specifically

sustainable business development and

i’ll be talking about that in the

context of the third coal

project which

we believe is being developed in a

sustainable

and inclusive manner taking care

not only of the energy requirements of

the country

but also taking care of the principal

stakeholders

of the project which we believe are the

people of thir parker

so energy security through sustainable

development

that is what we believe thar can offer

to the country and to all of us

i will not talk about a lot of technical

details

but just to set the context right those

of you

who don’t know we have set up pakistan’s

first

open pit coal mine in third block 2

which is producing almost 4 million tons

of lignite every year

and for the past one and a half years we

have we have produced six and a half

million tons of lignite

which has powered two 330 megawatt

mine mouth power plants which is set up

uh

by a private company and it has produced

6.4

billion kilowatt hours of electricity

which has gone to the national grid

so those of the people who there are

still some

who believe okay there is no

you know coal in third it is not good it

has got a lot of sulphur it is not good

for power generation

all those myths have been busted so

anybody who ask you tell them third coal

has produced electricity for the past

one and a half years

and in charlotte will produce

electricity and power the country

for the next 50 years or more

so moving on because

you cannot talk about sustainability or

the betterment of people unless you have

a

source of economic revenues and the

source of economic revenues in our case

is the huge potential of third coal

which allah has blessed our country

175 billion tons of coal

that is the estimated amount of coal

which is present in third parker

and it is good for hundreds of years of

you know energy requirements for the

country the way we have developed our

project is in phases

so we have already completed phase one

we are now into phase two whereby we are

doubling the capacity of the mind

and mining is a game of economy of scale

so we are

increasing the mine and lowering the

cost of coal initial cost was high

but ultimately the coal coal price as

you see this green line

comes down when we do phase two

we will be equal to almost equal to the

imported coal price

and then at phase three and phase four

subsequent phases will take third coal

price

to a level whereby it will become the

cheapest

base load energy uh resource for the

country

inshallah and that is not very far and

who has done it

yes there were chinese who have come and

supported us

but these are the two people dilip kumar

from nagar parker

and chetan kumar from mithi both

graduates of this university

2009 who are now the mind managers of

third block to mine these are both

2009 graduates and other than them

there are 79 mehran engineering

university graduates who are currently

working at the mine and power plants

79 people from this university

so the real purpose of third coal was

not to produce cheap electricity for

people sitting in slab

karachi or rest of the country we do not

want to do

what unfortunately was done in

balochistan

the entire country you know benefited

from sui gas but if you go there right

now you know what’s the situation over

there

people are still burning firewood you

know for their

heating and cooking needs so we want

that our project should be developed in

an inclusive manner

whereby we take care of the triple

bottom line

you must have heard that sustainability

basically talks about

the environment the economy

and the society or the triple bottom

line they call it

the people planet and prosperity all

three unless all three go together the

project is not successful

and this is what our sponsors which is

the government of

and a combination of private companies

decided that we will do this project in

a manner that it will bring prosperity

to the real stakeholders of the project

which are the people of third park

how are we doing it we set up a

not-for-profit organization called

foundation and the the chief operating

officer of third foundation

is also a mehran graduate sitting here

naseem asab

so our vision was that while we produce

electricity

from coal we will make sure that we take

sustainable and graduated

interventions in different areas

so that the lives of the 30 people

improve as we go along and

the benchmarks that we used for our csr

work

was not something which is traditionally

called csr you see a sr option school

setup

these are things which unfortunately

corporates do

uh mostly for lip service we don’t want

lip service

we want that any intervention that we do

in third parkar

is sustainable and the only way you can

do it

is to align your business needs with

the community requirements and if there

is a good match

your project will be success and we

told ourselves that unless we make a

positive

change in the lives of the 30 people we

will not term

third coal a successful project so we

selected

united nations sustainable development

goals sdgs most of you must have heard

it

sdgs there are 17 goals and

basically the prioritized goals in the

center that you see

encompass all the basic necessities

of human life and if you

are compliant in all these goals

then you can say that your society the

community the city the town

is unsvg compliant all 130

countries of the world have signed up

that they will become

unsdg compliant by 2030. what our vision

for thar parker is that we

together with government of sindh will

inshallah make

slam code which has a population of 250

000 people or quarter of a million

people where all these coal fields are

to become unsdg compliant by 2025

five years ahead of the global timeline

and this is not just a slogan

i’ll tell you what are some of the steps

which we have taken

to make sure that we inshallah will

achieve our target by 2025.

[Applause]

on the left you see this was a school

building

or a school hut this is exactly three

and a half kilometers

from our coal mine 2015 mansingbird

village

this small jumpity or hut

used to be a school where 70

children were studying from grade one to

five with one teacher

who has not been paid for the last six

months

so while we were setting up this two

billion dollars project

just three kilometers away from this

village of mines mansing bill

we we thought that what good is our

project

if the children living around us have to

go to schools in huts like this so we

decided

that we will change all that we will be

responsible

for quality education for the entire

block too which is our lease area as

well as islam code

if the government of sin chips in with

us so we what we set up was

uh nine of these third foundation

schools these are primary schools

and within block two and uh

islam court area we have

2500 students right now

who are studying in these schools free

of cost some of these schools we have

collaborated with tcf

but some of the schools are being run by

ourselves

so this is because without education

we believe that the people of third will

not be enabled

to be part of our project

[Applause]

the other thing which we did was as i

mentioned we aligned our business needs

with what the community can offer

in the project we required a lot of you

know workforce

scaffolders steel fixers masons painters

and instead of bringing skilled people

from punjab or kpk

drivers from miyawali we thought that

why not train

local theories and let them do this job

instead of hiring them as

unskilled laborers we can train them

through institutions like dti nlc amon

tech

and others and by doing three months or

six months courses we trained these

local

almost 1400 thirties into these skills

and they

started earning a lot more money than a

simple

usl would by working in the mining and

the power project

we also started the 30 engine training

engineers program

whereby we sent 73 engineers including

three

females to china for six months and out

of those 73

67 are currently employed at the power

plant and they are operating this

coal-fired power plant in third part

these are all people from third

and adjoining districts we

talk about health if you talk about

thirpaka is one of the lowest human

development indices

in entire pakistan i think it ranks one

or four out of the 114 districts in

pakistan

so it would be very shameful that

corporations and government is doing

multi-billion dollar project

while the people in thir parker are

dying of

hunger of you know lack of water

lack of basic health needs you know this

doesn’t make sense

so we thought we must do interventions

in health

and the first thing we set up was a

mother and child clinic called the marvy

mother

mother and child clinic whereby almost

uh i think

25 000 people have been treated

but the big intervention we did was to

set up 120 bed

state of the art hospital in

collaboration with

uh you know government of sin and other

private uh donors so this is some of the

views of

these uh things now we are a mining

company

mining company doesn’t do you know

prosthetics for

amputees this is a camp that we ran

last year so we partnered with nayakadam

and we have this artificial prosthetic

limbs

camp in sir parker which was done last

year over 115 people benefited

and some of them are gainfully employed

there are people who

were playing cricket you know playing

soccer after getting these limbs filled

and the biggest problem in third park is

water as you all know

there’s lots of other plants but most of

them are not running

so what we decided was that within our

project affected area within our third

block 2 and

wherever we have done interventions

we’ve taken over all the government

owned auto plants and we started

operating it ourselves

they were in a not so good condition

when we took them over

we refurbished all of them and right now

there are 18 narrow plants being run

in our area providing who standard

quality water to almost

40 000 people and the best thing about

it

is this now 12

30 local females have been trained as

auto plant operators it took us

you know three months just to train them

to how to run an auto plant

and in the same villages where they’re

living now they are operating the auto

plants

earning you know eighteen thousand five

hundred rupees a month

working from you know four to six hours

a day and

the people are so happy

now the other intervention is uh

flagship project which is

uh the dump truck training program i

think

you all must have seen um

videos from al jazeera and dw

and other news outlets who have covered

this story

and this is not just a lip service there

are right now

26 30 females who are driving these dump

trucks right now gainfully employed

they’re not trainees anymore

because this program took a lot of time

and this ladies and gentlemen

is an example of how

resilient the people of third park are

the the the women in the center is

called mohini

she was 10 years old when she got

married 12 years old when she had her

first child

and she has five kids and at the age of

28 she decided to become a dumper truck

driver

now imagine a female from mithi driving

a 60-ton drum truck

with five kids who was married at 10

years old

that is resilience getting to a college

college and university and studying and

that is not resilience

we are all very lucky these are the

people who actually

you know deserve to be helped and

deserve to be appreciated deserve to be

enabled and empowered

empowered

uh again community needs we have 4 000

people in our block

and they all have to eat lunch so we

went to the villages and asked for

ladies who could cook you know we have

19 canteens

running and we told them okay let’s cook

uh you know

as much as you can and this lady she

cooks 150

uh meals a day and we instead of you

know

getting a caterer from karachi like you

know the famous caterers

we told them let’s get home cooked food

from tarpakar

so it’s just alignment of business needs

with what the community can offer

and she’s earning 15 000 rupees a month

there there’s a widow

and she’s got two daughters they’re all

working and now she’s hiring more people

from our village

to supply food to our company so we did

nothing this is simply

just an alignment of the needs now

resettlement one of the villages got

resettled and i

i invite all of you after the covet

pandemic you know ends uh to come to

thir parker

and visit this village this is truly a

model village one of the most successful

relocations in the history of pakistan

whereby we’ve you know uh provided all

these housing facilities

to the people who have been moved and

they will be getting 100 000 rupees

per month lifetime um

per family and this has been announced

by the government of sin and for two

years they have already been getting

this so it’s not just a

you know promise that will not be

fulfilled they will be

compensated we have planted more than

850

000 uh trees under the million tree

program in third park

uh for every tree that we cut we almost

plant 27 29 trees

versus five that is required the

biosaline agriculture the

the the saline water that we take out is

used for agriculture

fish in thor you must not have heard

about fishing in third

we have actually proven it in the

reservoir of guarano

so all of this ladies and gentlemen was

done

because we believe as a company

that unless we take care

of the people of third park under whose

feet these coal reserves

have been discovered our project will

not be successful

and these are just tiny steps i am not

saying that we are there

maybe we have done five percent six

percent of what we need to do

but if all the projects in the country

are developed

in this inclusive development manner

whereby

the people in the communities around the

projects are taken care of

i’m sure our country will transform we

believe

third will inshallah trump transform

karbaland pakistan and pakistan will

inshallah be a better country

in the next five years thank you very

much for your time thanks a lot