In meal or malt the small to medium-sized businesses are being adversely affected by the economic turndown and power shortages while the ruling party is still incapable to combat their survival. Many the small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs) are bewildering to either to lay off workers to get through the crisis or simply to shut down.

Realizing profoundly, the most severely affected for small to medium-sized businesses, is the cost of production that makes them uncompetitive in the market and unquestionably affects their sales. Although the inflation and currency devaluation and higher wage demands has been a wave of disappointment and sharply jacked up their input costs and cuts their revenues but the frequent power cuts and its shortage can't let the small to medium-sized businesses be survived. The concerning matter is that more than 70 SMEs are dependant upon Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco) that stands they are hardly runs a shift of 8 hours a day but sometime can't.

Considerably, in the game of spiking cost and slow demand causing them shut down their manufacturing capacities as they see a little hope of making through the present crisis. The small and medium exporters are losing orders from their foreign buyers because of the delays of shipment of previous export because of energy crisis. As a result the buyers are turning to China and India for having timely delivery of their ordered goods. This has become a pretty kettle of fish for small medium enterprises to accept the conditions of buyers of the delivery of goods on credit bases in order to survive in the market.

As the ideas of mine are concerned that if your business is running furnish and garnish then you can obtain financial benefits either from banks or from anywhere else but falling of production and sales might be having acute cash flow problems that's what our SMEs are facing. In addition with this the mark up rate is no long will be helpful for small medium enterprises and has become the issue and tissue for further declination of their businesses. Advisor to Prime Minister on Finance Shaukat Tareen minimized the mark up rate to 17% in May, as it was 18% but its just pinch a very little stuff for SMEs.

Accepting reality that SMEs are continuously facing several challenges; limited access to formal fiancé and credit and modern technology, unfriendly tax regime, over regulation, poor quality production, shortage of skilled labour, lake of marketing research and techniques. One can utterly comprehend that these factors are largely responsible for breeding inefficiencies and stunning the growth of small and medium enterprises. In the above -mentioned scenario the question arises, where does the government stand? And why this important is not being reinforced? Why government doesn't implement policies and take initiative to help this sector instead of existence of abundant opportunities for expansion and value-addition in the manufacturing? These expressions and sentiments of SMEs letting them feel to how to fight for their survival in this deteriorating situation. mawaiz.khan@businessmonitorpk.com