Ombudsman registers 13 cases against power company

Federal ombudsman registers Sepco following complaints of overcharging filed by residents of Sukkur.


Express October 15, 2010

SUKKUR: The federal ombudsman has registered 13 cases against the Sukkur Electric Power Company (Sepco), following complaints of overcharging filed by residents of Sukkur.

All these complaints were filed from June to August this year. According to a letter issued by the Wafaqi Muhtasib Ombudsman’s secretariat regional office Sukkur, several residents, including Hafeezur Rehman Qureshi, Baharuddin Shaikh, Atta Mohammad and Abdul Waheed Shaikh, filed complaints that their meters were overread by Sepco.

The letter said that the petitioners had complained of increasing corruption in the department. When an inquiry was carried out, the residents’ claims were found to be true. The discrepancies in readings were consequently resolved by issuing correction letters and providing credit of excess readings through adjustment notes.

Ignorant officials, angry residents

The charges levelled against Sepco and the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (Hesco) go much further than overcharging. Every second day people are out on the roads, burning tyres and chanting slogans against electricity companies.

“Our electricity shortage is around 850 megawatts (MW),” said Sepco Superintendent Engineer, Sukkur, Rafiq Noorani. But Hesco and Sepco media manager Sadiq Kobhar said their shortage was half of this: 415MW.

The confusion among officials is interpreted as negligence by residents of Sukkur and its surrounding areas.

“Rising prices and the government’s attitude towards us has pushed us over the edge,” says Muhammad Ahmed, who runs a crockery shop in Sukkur.

According to Sepco’s Noorani, the shortage assigned to Sepco is 850MW because of which they have scheduled eight hours of power outages in urban areas and 12 hours in rural areas. But if Kobhar’s word is to be given precedence, then the scheduled load shedding should be six in cities and eight in villages.

When the media manager was told of the information lapse, he promised to “look into it”.

Residents feel that things were bad even when Hesco was supplying electricity in the entire province with the exception of Karachi but now, after Sepco was established, the situation has considerably worsened.

Officials at grid stations are seldom willing to share facts. The much-parroted sentence is that “power outages take place on the orders of the main power dispatch centre at Jamshoro”.

First it was the ‘overloaded grid stations’ and now it is a ‘huge shortage in supply’ that is behind the scheduled, and unscheduled, hours of power outages.

“It [power outage] takes place so many times during the day that my business is ruined,” complained Abdul Aziz, a tailor. “Every other hour my employees are just sitting there without doing any work because there is no light, which causes delays in all our orders,” he added. Aziz felt that the least Sepco can do is to schedule electricity shutdowns in the day so that people can sleep in peace at night.

Meanwhile, goldsmith Muhammad Shakir has more serious concerns. “The light goes at sundown, which is when we are shutting down our shops,” he explained. This can be quite dangerous because the dark provides cover to robbers and bandits.

Shakir also felt that it was not fair that the electricity tariff continues to rise while the supply is always inadequate. “We’re already spending so much money on running generators,” he exclaimed. Ahmed said the electricity situation was so bad that several big businessmen and industrialists had left Pakistan.

People can take to the streets, attack Sepco offices, damage their vehicles but nothing will change, he said pessimistically.

Meanwhile, the Sepco CEO was found to be quite elusive. He was not available in his office and his secretary always repeats that he is ‘out of the city to attend a meeting’.

The in-charge at the power dispatch centre in Jamshoro, Maqsood Memon, where all the blame is shifted, said he was restricted from issuing any statement to the press.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 15th, 2010.

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