Cross-city protest: Electricity crisis irks rest of Sindh
The Pakistan Peoples Party’s leaders and workers took to the streets in several cities on Sunday, decrying prolonged power outages across the province.
While the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (Hesco) is responsible for power supply, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PML-N) leadership took the rap in their slogans and speeches.
“The federal government is biased against Sindh and its residents are being made to suffer up to 20 hours of daily load-shedding,” said senator Aajiz Dhamra at a sit-in in the Benazirabad district. Hundreds of workers sat in the protest camp outside Hesco’s regional office in Nawabshah. They blamed the state minister for water and power, Abid Sher Ali, for his alleged instructions to Hesco to suspend electricity for long hours.
In Hyderabad, the workers of the PPP surrounded the Hesco head office and tore down PML-N posters and banners displayed along Hesco’s main entrance. They also hurled stones inside the office as the police watched helplessly and the party’s leadership unsuccessfully repeated requests to avoid violence.
Hesco supplies electricity to 14 districts in southern and central Sindh. The company receives 790 megawatt (MW) from the national grid but the demand is around 1,000 MW.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 28th, 2014.
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The PPP's idiotic energy policies, (building furnace oil power stations) created this situation in the first place. The logical thing to do would be to opt for the cheapest energy mix, i.e. coal and hydro but instead they let circular debt get out of hand and made no effort to prevent this crisis.
Now they are complaining. Tough.