PESHAWAR, June 15: At least 1000 telephone lines of different exchanges in Karak tehsil are non-functional for the last more than six months, causing great inconvenience to the people besides incurring huge losses to the company. The main line running along the Karak-Sabirabad Road was seriously damaged at several places due to construction of the road which is going on at a snail’s pace for the last one year.

Residents of different villages said they had lodged many complaints with the concerned quarters to replace the cable. They said the PTCL officials had turned a deaf ear to their complaints while the telephone lines remained dead for most of the time.

A PTCL official said that they had given a map of the cable to the contractor and asked him to avoid causing damage to the main line. “But, you know, contractors always consider PTCL cables as enemy’s property and never care for saving them from harm during construction.

A number of residents said at time they faced very unusual and difficult situations due to the dysfunctional telephone lines.

A subscriber of Lakki Banda village, Shaheen Khan, said that a couple of months ago his family had to go through an ordeal after the PTCL workers of Mithakhel exchange wrongly joined a cut-off cable. He said that they received a call soon after 15 members of his family had left for Peshawar in a flying-coach.