KARACHI: Thousands of phone subscribers suffer: City govt, PTCL at odds
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, Sept 3: The Pakistan Telecommunication Company and the city government are at loggerheads over the mode and schedule of the work for the repairing and shifting of the underground phone cables damaged during the development work at various places in the city.
The lack of coordination between the city government and PTCL has been causing an inordinate delay in the repair of damaged cables. Thousands of the affected phone subscribers are in a fix as the phone company appeared unable to give them a precise date for the resumption of its service.
The worst affected area is the part of Federal B Area where cables were damaged during the process of development work being carried out by the city government for several months.
Media Coordinator for the PTLC in Karachi, Athar Javed Sufi, said that it had been decided in a series of meetings between his company and various civic agencies that the PTCL would be informed in advance whenever and wherever digging for development work would be initiated to avoid any breakdown of its service.
However, he regretted, the PTCL was getting no such intimation while the agencies did carry out digging and other work elsewhere in the city and, as a result, phone cables were being damaged.
He pointed out that the complaints about phones going out of order due to the damaged had pouring in been and were still pending repair in F.B` Area, Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Clifton, Defence, KDA Scheme-1 and several other areas where development work was being carried out by different agencies.
He claimed that city government officials had not been cooperating with PTCL officials for the prompt repair work. The ultimate sufferers appeared to be the phone subscribers, he added.
Sources in the PTCL Azizabad Telephone Exchange said that they had been receiving scores of such complaints from different blocks of the area everyday but the company had no option but to soothe the aggrieved subscribers by assuring them that their connections would be restored ‘soon’.
The sources claimed that at one stage, PTCL tried to initiate repair work at a section of Shahrah-i-Pakistan to ease the growing pressure from the increasing number of the affected subscribers, but they had to face resistance from the city government officials who indulged in altercation with the PTCL officials.
On the orders of the Gulberg Town nazim, they added, three of the PTCL officials at the site had been sent to the area police station and kept in lock-up. They were let off later by only after intervention by higher PTCL authorities, they said.
At the exchange, several perturbed complainants were seen exchanging hot words with the counter staff to seek a definite day and time for the restoration of their connections.
Some of the angry subscribers told them that they had been visiting the exchange daily for several weeks only to get the assurance from one officer or the other that the phones would be restored soon.
An executive at the exchange maintained that the PTCL had the required capacity and strength to rectify the faults and maintain an uninterrupted service but only in normal conditions. However, he added, the uplift work undertaken on a massive scale in the city had turned the conditions abnormal.
Another PTCL officer revealed that the particular cable fault that had rendered many telephones in Azizabad exchange area dead in recent weeks could not be rectified as yet because of the city government’s refusal to allow PTCL technicians to undertake the repair work. He said that city government officials were of the view that indulgence of PTCL people in cable repair work at a place where already many engineers and workers of other agencies were busy mending roads, sewerage lines, etc., could create a mess and, thus, hinder the uplift work.
“As soon as we are allowed to carry out the repair work, we will be able to rectify all the complaints lodged so far,” he said, but had no answer to the question that how and when the required permission may be granted.
On Saturday, most of the aggrieved subscribers, after visiting various officers, including DEs and SDOs sitting at the exchange, had to leave without getting a definite date for the restoration of their out-of-order telephones.
According to the public dealing staff, the areas affected by the cable faults include blocks 2, 3, 7, 9, 14, 15 and 16 of Federal B Area. Among the complainants were those who said that they could only hear the dial tone on their phones because the loud and constant noise accompanying the tone would not let them talk to a caller or a called person.
“This is one of the common problems being reported by our subscribers ever since the cables had suffered damage during the digging work,” admitted a staffer.
Technicians supposed to rectify faults in field said that they had got overburdened by the work in recent weeks due to an increased number of complaints being lodged at the exchange. They said they had to repair the cables repeatedly as the digging of roads in a ruthless manner had been causing damage to the underground lines at different sections again and again.
