Brace for the summers: PESCO rewards ‘good’ areas with 4-8 hours of power cuts

Areas with higher power theft will witness outages of more than eight hours.

PESHAWAR/SHANGLA/BANNU:

The Peshawar Electric Supply Company (Pesco) issued a schedule on Sunday detailing power outages in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) for April.

Pesco spokesperson Shaukat Afzal said the supply of electricity would be curtailed for four to eight hours in areas where illegal use of electricity is low, like Peshawar, Abbottabad, Swabi, Haripur, Nowshera and Mardan.

However, in areas with higher illegal use, like Tank, Bannu, Lakki Marwat, Charsadda, Shabqadar, Besham, Battagram, Hari Chand and Peshawar’s outskirts, load-shedding will exceed eight hours.

Afzal said industrial estates will be exempt from power outages as recovery from the areas is 100% and illegal use of electricity is minimum, except the steel industries where Pesco will carry out four hours of load-shedding.

Besham boils up  

Hundreds of people in Besham tehsil of Shangla protested against the closure of an electricity feeder and blocked the Karakoram Highway (KKH) for three hours.

Traders and shopkeepers held a rally from Mingora Road to the tehsil on the call of a local action committee for public welfare that was led by Sherinzada Khan, Lala Mukhtar and Kifayatullah.

The protesters chanted slogans against Pesco officials, State Minister for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali and the federal government for halting the supply of electricity to their area.

The protesters blocked KKH at Besham Chowk, causing inconvenience to commuters and transporters.

Mukhtar said the state minister should think before accusing the people of K-P of electricity theft and said the people of his own province were the real power thieves. He said despite providing electricity to Punjab, the province was being accused of stealing power.

He blamed Wapda officials of issuing bogus bills to consumers in the tehsil and warned of stopping power supply from Khan Khawar Dam if the government does not restore electricity in one week. Protesters also threatened to set fire to vehicles belonging to Pesco in case their demand is not met.

Last week, Abid Sher Ali said Pesco would be cutting power supply to 11 feeders in seven districts of the province, including Shangla and Bannu, owing to poor recoveries and line losses. However, a Wapda official said no feeder had been shut down in the area but the ‘normal’ power outages had extended to 20 hours.

Think before you speak

Traders and lawyers of Bannu district said they will be filing a R5 billion lawsuit against Abid Sher Ali for calling them electricity thieves and hurting their businesses by cutting power for long hours.

Addressing a news conference on Sunday at the Bannu Press Club, office bearers of traders and lawyers’ bodies said the minister continues to accuse the people of Bannu of stealing electricity even though they suffer 20 to 22 hours of load-shedding.

Union leader Malik Maqbool Khan said the electricity provided to a single factory in Punjab was equal to the entire electricity supply of Bannu.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 14^th, 2014.