Digital meters to curb electricity theft

LESCO hopes to curb electricity pilferage through new a satellite system and digital meters.

LAHORE: The Lahore Electricity Supply Company (Lesco) will attempt to curb electricity pilferage through new digital meters and a satellite system that has been successfully tested locally, the Lesco authorities said on Tuesday.

The company has decided to extend the project across Pakistan after it got the results of a pilot project in Delhi Gate, Lahore. Lesco, in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), replaced the old electricity meters in the industrial and residential areas of Delhi Gate with the new Turkish manufactured digital meters.

Lesco Chief Executive Javaid Pervaiz is to submit a report to the managing director of the Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco), Rasool Khan Mehmood, on Wednesday (today). Lesco officials said the report would highly recommend the new meters.

In the first phase of the project, the meters will be installed in areas where electricity theft is relatively high. These meters will not only help check theft, but also help to ease power consumption.

Lesco officials say that that the readings on these new digital meters cannot be tampered with, making it hard to conceal electricity theft. They send data about electricity consumption direct to the company’s database via satellite, they added.

“The satellite sends the data to the main server in America. After that it is reported to the Lesco administration,” a Lesco official said. He added that once the digital meters are installed nationwide, Lesco will purchase its own server from America.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 27^th, 2010.

an>   pIn Lahore, he said, the Mughalpura Railway Workshop was the origin of the virus’s outbreak. The health authorities had taken no preventive measures to control the spread of the virus as no fumigation campaign was launched in the affected areas which resulted in the large-scale outbreak of the disease, he said.

Dr Mian said he was attending to some 200 patients at his clinic in Lahore daily. He said that Dr Fayyaz Ranjha’s suspension for his failure in controlling the dengue virus was a tactic calculated to divert the attention of the Punjab government from the actual issue of the wide scale outbreak of the virus.

He added that the government was employing an old method of spray which was not effective in eradicating the dengue mosquito. Prof Akram said dengue was a global health problem.

He said population growth, poor housing planning, lack of sanitation and health facilities, illiteracy and ignorance amongst people were also the causes of the rapid increase in dengue cases.

He said that people must adopt precautionary measures and stop storing water for more than one day.

He also said stored water must be changed daily to halt the breeding of mosquitoes.

Prof Akram said that initially Jinnah Hospital had set up a 10-bed dengue ward which quickly increased to 20 beds and now 30 beds had been added due to the huge influx of patients.

All of the beds, he said, were occupied at the moment. He said treatment facilities along with diagnostics were being provided free of cost on the direction of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 27^th, 2010.