16/08/2026
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POWER CRISIS, PRODUCTION LOSSES
How Load-Shedding and the Gas Shortage Are Pushing Bangladesh's Factories Toward Default
By Mousumi Islam
Entrepreneur | Industry Leader | Women's Rights Spokesperson | Philanthropist | Global Influencer
Bangladesh's factory floors are running on borrowed time. Across the country, electricity from the Palli Bidyut Samities — the rural distribution cooperatives that supply roughly four crore customers — has fallen far short of demand for weeks. In many upazilas, industrial units are losing whole shifts to power cuts that stretch to eight, ten, even sixteen hours a day. Layer a deepening gas shortage on top of that, and the result is not an inconvenience. It is an industrial emergency — one I am seeing first-hand at our own facility, Promixco Group, a medical equipment and device manufacturer in Gazipur.
The Numbers Behind the Crisis
Reporting from national outlets over the past two weeks paints a consistent picture: demand from the country's 80 Palli Bidyut Samities has been running at 8,000–9,000MW against allocations of only 5,000–6,000MW, leaving rural industrial zones to absorb the shortfall. National load-shedding has repeatedly crossed 3,000MW on peak days, and gas supply to the grid has fallen well below the roughly 3.85 billion cubic feet a day that industry needs.
National load-shedding on peak days 3,000MW+
PBS combined demand vs. allocation 8,000–9,000MW vs. 5,000–6,000MW
Gas demand vs. supply (national grid) ~3.85 bcf vs. ~2.0 bcf
Reported factory production time lost to outages up to 35%
Meghna Group factories shut (Aug 10 onward) 57 of 57
Nabil Group capacity utilisation 40–50%
What It Looks Like on the Ground
The disruption is not evenly spread, but it is everywhere. In Gazipur, a garment factory employing nearly 2,000 workers reports losing three to four productive hours a day — every outage forces a generator start-up that itself eats 20 to 30 minutes before output resumes. In Feni, a food processing company puts the daily production loss from load-shedding at around 35 percent. In Habiganj, tea gardens describe processed leaf spoiling whenever power disappears for hours at a stretch, since tea processing cannot simply pause and restart.
The gas side of the crisis has hit even harder for heavy industry. Steel, cement, glass, textile, dyeing, spinning and garment producers are among the worst affected, with some conglomerates reporting that dozens of factories have been idled entirely. One major group's chairman said his 57 factories — spanning sugar, edible oil, flour, cement and essential goods — have been shut since mid-August because the plants are not receiving even the minimum gas needed to run. Another large group has around 20 of its 28 processing factories closed for the same reason, and a third is operating at 40–50 percent capacity while it scrambles for alternative fuel sources.
A Case in Point: Promixco Group, Gazipur
I am writing this not only as an industry observer but as someone living the crisis directly. Promixco Group, our medical equipment and device manufacturing facility in Gazipur, is operating under some of the worst Palli Bidyut conditions we have seen.
Unscheduled, prolonged outages have become routine rather than exceptional, and each one halts precision manufacturing processes that cannot simply be switched back on — medical device production involves calibration-sensitive equipment, cleanroom environments, and quality-control processes that are disrupted, not just paused, every time the power drops.
For a medical device manufacturer, the stakes of this instability go beyond lost revenue. Interrupted production cycles risk compliance and quality issues in a sector where consistency is non-negotiable, delay shipments to hospitals and healthcare distributors who depend on us, and make it far harder to hold to the delivery timelines our buyers — domestic and international — expect. Like many well-run factories across Gazipur, we are absorbing generator costs, schedule slippage, and mounting pressure on cash flow, through no failure of our own operations, but because the basic input we depend on — reliable power — is not being delivered.
We build medical devices that hospitals rely on. When the grid fails us for hours at a stretch, it isn't just a production delay — it puts pressure on every part of the chain that depends on us delivering on time. — Mousumi Islam, on Promixco Group's experience in Gazipur
From Lost Hours to Loan Default
This is where the crisis stops being a production-line problem and becomes a financial one. Factories that cannot deliver on order timelines cannot invoice on schedule. Revenue that doesn't arrive cannot service the working-capital loans, LC obligations, and term loans that most manufacturers depend on. Owners who have run compliant, well-managed operations for years — the same companies banks would normally classify as low-risk — are now missing repayment dates simply because the grid and the gas network are failing them, not because of any fault in how they run their businesses.
Compounding this, distribution companies themselves are under financial strain: dues to furnace-oil-based power plants have piled up to an estimated Tk 14,000 crore, and operators have warned they may struggle to sustain supply unless payments are cleared. That is a systemic funding gap, and factory owners are absorbing the consequences of it on their own balance sheets.
Even 20 to 30 minutes of lost working time is significant for a large factory. Production falls as a result. — a Gazipur garment factory manager, on restarting generators after each outage
We are not getting even the minimum amount of gas needed to operate the factories. — a conglomerate chairman whose 57 factories have been shut since mid-August
The Case for Urgent Action
The pattern across every affected district is the same: a widening gap between what industry needs and what the grid and gas network can deliver, worsening at exactly the time export deadlines, essential-goods supply chains, and tens of thousands of jobs depend on stability. Left unaddressed, the risk is no longer just missed production targets — it is a wave of loan defaults among otherwise sound companies, job losses in the very factories that anchor local economies, and a credibility hit to Bangladesh's manufacturing base among international buyers.
As an entrepreneur and industry voice, I am calling on policymakers, the Power Development Board, Petrobangla, and the banking sector to treat this as the emergency it is: prioritise reliable gas and power allocation to productive industry, extend genuine forbearance to factories whose repayment failures trace directly to supply failures rather than mismanagement, and fast-track the fuel-payment settlements needed to stabilise generation. Bangladesh's factory owners have shown they can compete globally. They should not be penalised — by default notices or by silence — for a crisis that was not of their making.
