The residents and social organisations of Matli who wrote a letter to the minister for power, received in response, from another government agency, a reality check on exactly how important they are in the grand scheme of things.
The frustrated residents wrote an open letter to Naveed Qamar, the federal minister for water and power, saying that they face power outages from 11pm to 5am each day, but neighbouring Tando Muhammad Khan, which is a constituency of the federal minister, undergoes only four hours of load-shedding.
"There has been no light in our town for the last 18 hours, but Tando Muhammad Khan, which is hardly 10 minutes away, is free from load-shedding," said Amin Khatri, a resident of Matli, while talking to The Express Tribune.
In response to this complaint, officials from the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company said that Matli does not have the elevated status of Tando Muhammad Khan. They said that the additional load-shedding is taking place because of problems with the Hyderabad grid station.
Mohammad Jumman, a resident of the 'favoured' Tando Mohammad Khan, claimed, however, that they used to face the same situation. But since Naveed Qamar became minister for power, load-shedding hours have gone down a little. "Our town is not free from load-shedding," he said. "The hide and seek continues for at least three hours."
He admitted, however, that the situation in the town was still better than that of the Hyderabad region. "There are six to eight hours of load-shedding in Hyderabad and we have just heard that there has been no light in Karachi for two to three days. We are really happy and the people of our town pray for our power minister," he said.
with additional input from PPI
Published in The Express Tribune, July 8th, 2011.
1726054615-0/OpenAI-(2)1726054615-0-270x192.webp "openai s o1 model tried to copy itself during shutdown tests")
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