Every time you ring the complaint number at 118, you are told same old excuses.
KARACHI: This is with reference to Sumaiya Lakhani’s Speaker’s Corner on Karachi being the city of lights. For the past 10 nights, electricity supply in the area of DHA where I live (Phase IV) has been highly irregular. On a 24-hour basis, I would say that the area has no power for at least 10 hours. Every time you ring the complaint number at 118, you are told the same old excuse: “Madam, feeders have tripped, and we are doing our best to fix the problem. And it could take some time. Thank you”. This has happened during a phone call made at 4 am so I asked the KESC staffer on the other end of the line to tell me exactly when the electricity would come back. The answer I got: “Madam we don’t know.” It turns out that the people who man the complaint numbers have no contact with the field staff who fix the faults, which clearly makes for an inefficient system. I also found out that DHA Phase IV is a ‘no-loss zone’ which means that theft of electricity or non-payment of bills is minimal, and despite that it is subjected to as much loadshedding as in areas where power theft is rampant.
As someone who pays her bills on a regular basis and always on time, I am utterly disgusted by the management strategy of KESC. There seems to be no concept of being honest and accurate with the customer and the loadshedding schedule makes little sense.
Samia Tariq
Published in The Express Tribune, July 17th, 2011.
