If Karachi won’t pay its bills, KESC will keep cutting it off
Karachi’ites enraged by power cuts tend to amass on the roads, burn a few tyres and chant slogans till the police show up with empty promises. The less ‘proacive’ stay glued to the phone, screaming down the helpline to the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) staff for not restoring electricity to their area.
While it is true that KESC has not delivered on many of its promises, it is perhaps not fair to blame it for the entire situation. How long can Karachi expect free electricity and zero load shedding if large swathes of neighbourhoods do not pay their bills and steal power through kundas?
Break it, buy it
Both houses and factories owe KESC millions of rupees in unpaid bills. The figure is as high as Rs35 billion for private consumers.
If you want to know why your area has frequent power cuts, look no further than your neighbours. According to KESC, the behaviour of customers - both in paying their bills or stealing electricity (kunda) - dictates the number and duration of power cuts.
Areas are divided into low-loss, medium-loss and high-loss, which Ghufran Khan, the chief marketing communications officer at KESC, describes as “good, bad and ugly”. According to Khan, the “good” areas are those where power theft is far low and bill collection exceeds the ratios set by KESC. These areas are rewarded for good behaviour and experience no power cuts. In areas with moderate theft and issues with bill payment, there are three hours of power cuts. “Ugly” areas experience four-and-a-half hour power cuts.
Given how politicised the issue of power outages is in Karachi, it is hard to imagine how KESC would collect bill payments from party strongholds in the city.
“We have no issues saying ‘no’ to someone,” said Khan. “We have gone in and collected dues from Al Asif Square, Gulistan-e-Jauhar and Shireen Jinnah Colony, which had chronic problems.” He recounted KESC’s recent experience with collecting dues from Al Karam Square, an area dominated by one political party. “The area owed Rs430 million in arrears. We removed the transformers - if you just cut the power lines, they know how to fix them again.” Sure enough, the party representatives trotted up to KESC that explained it would be happy to replace the transformers if the bills were paid.
“We were assured we would be repaid so we replaced the transformers,” said Khan. “But after we received no money for a week, we took them out again.” The party representatives resurfaced and said that the consumers would pay their bills from then on, but not the arrears. KESC stuck to its guns and the supply was cut off for three days. As a result, the area’s residential associations signed an agreement with the utility, that was guaranteed by the party, and bill payment became regular. Government organisations, including the Rangers, Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) and the City District Government Karachi (CDGK), owe KESC over Rs20 billion. KWSB alone needs to pay Rs14.5 billion.
On Friday, KESC issued notices to the latter two, asking them to pay up within three days otherwise the company would act against them. Since the KWSB and city government are ‘strategic customers’, KESC has to guarantee them a supply. According to KESC’s agreement with the government, if their debts are not paid within 90 days, they are transferred to the federal government.
Et tu, employees?
KESC spent the major part of this year embroiled in a dispute with the 4,000 union workers who it attempted to lay off. It took the federal and provincial government’s involvement and guarantees from the civil administration and union leaders for an agreement to be brokered. While the impasse went on, workers staged a long-running sit-in, allegedly sabotaged electricity installations, attacked KESC field staff and offices and set up a parallel “response team” to fix problems that they had created - and made a hefty packet from power-hungry Karachi’ites.
“Even then, we were still fixing complaints,” maintained Khan. “We would send staff out very late at night or early in the morning, while the union workers were asleep.” The situation was further complicated, however, by the fact that political parties supported the labour unions. Law enforcement agencies did not take action against workers who were doing damage to KESC property or attacking and blockading its offices.
According to Khan, there has been an “invisible go-slow strike” by 2,000 of their current field workers. “They will take 25 complaints instead of 50, spend hours on one complaint ... these things are difficult to catch.”
But firing or penalising another 2,000 employees is not something that KESC can currently afford to do. “If it were ]
that easy, we wouldn’t be discussing it,” Khan told The Express Tribune.
Brace yourself
While the hordes of chanting union workers may have disappeared from KESC’s headquarters off Sunset Boulevard, it appears that the sabotage persists. Power cuts have increased in length, with some areas cut off for up to eight hours. The response time for complaints has also increased. KESC insists that it has the capacity to provide electricity to Karachi. It just does not have the resources. It blames the government’s lack of political will and short-sightedness for its problems, primarily the lack of a promised gas supply.
Some relief has been forthcoming. On Friday evening, Federal Minister for Petroleum and Natural Resources Dr Asim Hussain directed the Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) to increase its gas supply to KESC to 180mmcfd (million cubic feet per day).
“If the federal government were to give us even 240 of the 276mmcfd that we were guaranteed, then we could go back to the old schedule of power cuts.”
It appears to be a vicious cycle. KESC can’t pay its debtors - the SSGC and Pakistan State Oil - until it is paid by consumers. The SSGC, in turn, scales back its supply to KESC because it has not been paid. The federal government can’t guarantee the gas supply that it promised KESC when it was privatised, and it appears unlikely that it will be able to do so for the new plants the power utility is setting up, which will be functional by 2012.
What can customers expect then if KESC’s demands or the government’s promises go unfulfilled?
“Status quo,” remarked Khan. “We have no choice but to increase power cuts to six, eight and 10 hours for the ‘good, bad and ugly’ areas, and eight hours for industrial users.”
Published in The Express Tribune, July 30th, 2011.
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i would like to bring something very interesting to the people's attention. i live in an area with almost no loadshedding at all, it has been like this for years, however, whenever KESC has a row with the government we start experiencing heavy loadshedding, going upto continuous shut down for over 12 hours. as soon as the government concedes and the parties reach an agreement (which is soon) the loadshedding stops. you are free to make your own judgements.
There is a lesson to be learned from Kolkata here. Turns out that Kolkata (then Calcutta) had rampant strikes and outages in the early 1980s. The situation there was very similar to Karachi's current problems. . The West Bengal state (of which Kolkata is the capital) was governed by the CPI(M), left front government, which had nationalised many profitable as well as under-performing industrial entities. However, in case of the CESC (Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation), it did the opposite. It privatised the entire CESC power generation and distribution system: the generator, grids, transformers and meters ... tout. . The company, now private, was managed by the RPG group of Ram Prasad Goenka. They understood quickly, that the only way to cutback on the loadshedding hours, was to invest heavily in an expansion of power generation, in addition to recovering the under-utilised capacity of existing generators. But the only way to find the money to invest in those new power generators, was to go after the millions of petty thefts / leakages / pilferers of powers and make them pay up for past arrears. To this effect, it announced a single time amnesty / settlement program for defaulters. That was the key ... one time only. . Most people complied and settled for a reduction in their arrears. the CESC-RPG venture collected arrears on thefts, they would have a hard time enforcing, as well as found the much needed cash to jump start a much needed expansion. In the process, they cut down on the loadshedding hours and began the much needed overhaul of a parasitic power-theft habit. Perhaps, KESC can consider an approach on the same line. But here is the key ... one time only. It is the carrot and the stick both, at once. . That said, the above approach must indeed be given a strong teeth using the block reporting system suggested by Mssrs. Khidmatgar / Shahid Ali above. It would prevent the relapse into old patterns, which is much the bane of our polity.
@Shahid Ali I completely agree with you. KESC has a forum to report theft, and ass far an i know they do take action on it. Its called the speak up campaign. Anyone can report theft in any area by emailing at speakup@kesc.com.pk I think its time that we, the people of Karachi, take responsibility to fix this city as a single united entity rather than a divided mob
why not cut off electricity of those who do not pay bills only? why are people like us who alwas pay bills on time are suffering?
@Shahid Ali: I completely disagree with your view. Our state run institutions are the most over staffed on the planet. Consider this (And I know this because my dad is in the airline business): All over the world, the average number of maintenance staff per a single jumbo jet in an airline is 200. In PIA they have 400. Have a look at any one of the KESC offices that are staffed by the union workers. I just went there a couple of days ago to fix a billing problem. You will see maybe 2-3 guys actually working and about 10-12 guys just sitting idle and simply chatting up. We need to make our institutions and companies more efficient otherwise we simply cannot compete in the international market. Companies around the world have been investing in increasing efficiency, decreasing costs and time inputs and increasing productivity. And we are still in the stone age...still hiring people for such menial tasks as making records on paper despite the invention of tablet PCs.
Besides, it is not the job or obligation of the KESC to find work or provide new training for the redundant union workers. That is the job of the government which, as is evident to all, has done absolutely nothing in this regard.
@mamo: I agree about people are stealing openly. But I think we need to do something as a community of city of Karachi. Where are the people of Karachi? I think we have to take our city back. This is an opportunity to work together on an issue effecting each of us. If we are not going to put our minds together then who would do? I think we are capable of solving it. We have very smart people in the city. The only thing we need to believe is that we can do it.
I may have sounded naive when I proposed the reporting of theft. I agree. Just reporting won't solve the problem. KESC already has a telephone number to report via different means including SMS. You can find it on backside of your telephone bill. I am not sure though how successful it is. When I suggested reporting system, I meant a community driven data reporting and collection system that empowers neighborhoods. Similar to what @khidmatgar suggested in above post. Let me highlight what I meant by neighborhood based reporting system.
Each neighborhood starts collecting data about electricity usage of each unit as elaborated by @khdmatgar. This can be achieved by dedicated people who take meter readings that overlaps the billing cycle of KESC. Each neighborhood starts recording the readings provided by KESC bill for amount and charges billed. Each neighborhood record all power outages (scheduled or non-scheduled) in their neighborhood. All this data is published on a website in a fashion where it is available general public. During the above process we educate people to understand their electricity bills better, their energy consumption and ways to save energy. Electricity thieves are discouraged socially and by publishing their names on the website.Once we have done above, we do the following:
Work with courts to get a ruling that would allow public to levy a "Extreme Hardship" charge to KESC for every minutes of scheduled and unscheduled outage. Unscheduled outage would have higher charges. Organize a class action lawsuit against KESC for its inability to provide electricity even they are paid for the usage. We will have more data for the court of law. Even if we are not successful, we observe a citywide no electricity usage day and depriving them the revenue in a collective way.If above steps don't work then we go to the extreme measures that I would share later :)
@khidmatgar: I love the approach you highlighted. I had written a whole post on something on similar lines but lost it when I had the unscheduled power outage. Not sure it is called irony:) I will try to recollect and post in another entry if I am lucky enough to survive the next power outage.
@Ehson: I like your passion of automation but don't agree with firing people just because they are not well versed with technology. I believe in training and utilizing the resources correctly. I don't think we have extra people in our institutions. We are actually able to utilize them. We should fire the managers who are not creative enough to use the resources they have. If you look around you see the KESC infrastructure is in complete mess. You can observe pole wires coming to ones shoulder on I.I Chundrigar road.
@Maera: Brilliant idea of "Pre-Paid" electricy. We need to figure out how to do that.
Rarely does someone criticising a situation provides a solution. But Saba has done both. The 'Name and Shame' technique is the only option left, unfortunately. . Publish block by block list of residents and establishments with monthly power usage and payment status on a website. Appoint an invigilator from the volunteers every 10 blocks. Who will review and pursue defaulters and pilferers and in return for his or her successful collections and preventions receive a 10% commission. . When a block as a whole is collectively failing, it will be subjected to higher and longer hours of loadshedding. As you sow, so you reap. This way, the good blocks get the least load shedding, the ugly blocks get the most.
I think there should be some prepaid connection for electricity too.. People can buy switches and then utilize it.. Morally we r so distorted that people openly boast abt how they r using the kunda system.. Simply pethetic.. Hence I think electricity shud be prepaid only then people will pay there the bills.
This is unfortunate for Karachi that these political parties are involved in power theft in their respective constituencies, now there is no option for this load-shedding. Only Allah can teach them lesson.
8 hours of (scheduled) Load shedding in 30 days means no light for 10 days... 8 hours *30 days= 240 hours which when / by 24 hours in a day = 10 days a month
This scheduled load shedding does not include frequent power outages which lasts anywhere from 3 hours - 4 days (and this I am talking about Phase 4 in DHA, which I guess is in the good section)
We are paying the meter rent, surcharges, fuel price on an average reading since last 5 months (for an entire period of 30 days)....
The question is when the service given is only 20 days a month in case of scheduled load shedding & add 3-4 days in unscheduled power outages then why are we being charged for 30 days... ( I personally did the math and realized that this month & last month I only had power for 16 days)
After the weird prices of petrol this is the second biggest con... Think about it!
@Shahid Ali: to report to theft ha! ha! ha!
there is openly electricity theft no need to report it is matter to take action . Kesc doing noting they just black mailing and get money from people and government . statistically as per data of Kesc industrial area is exempt from load shedding also 20% residential area also exempt if they apply uniform policy i think it is reduce up to 1 to 1-1 1/2 and if we consider ups consummation i think load shedding may reduce to 1 hr . But Kesc is not try to reduce it b/c they want hang sword on us and want money against it from government
Excellent article Saba. This clarifies the situation and highlights the core problem. The question is what public can do in Karachi? Definitely agitation and blocking roads is not a solution. We are collectively punished for the behavior of some (I am generous here) who live among us. We need a way to prevent the electricity theft in our neighborhoods. If neighborhoods and communities get toghether to identify, report and make accountable who steal we can minimize this theft. KESC can also help by publishing the data neighborhood wise so that we can correlate and see how successful we are in minimizing power theft. I propose setting up a website where this data can be published and tracked. We can use this website and cellphone to report theft. This may not solve the problem completely but it has a potential for neighborhoods in Karachi to work together towards solving a problem that most of us are effected.