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| March 31, 2007 | Saturday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 11, 1428 |
People suffer amid Fesco’s word jugglery: Loadshedding hits textiles
FAISALABAD, March 30: Unscheduled loadshedding by the Faisalabad Electric Supply Company has brought the textile industry in a trying situation as the industrialists fear delay in completing export consignments.
The duration of power suspension in many areas exceeds four to five hours which is affecting the production of different textile units and powerlooms. Most of the exporters say they were expecting outages in May, but the Fesco authorities have resorted to loadshedding quite early.
Faisalabad has thousands of powerlooms and a numbers of textile mills — processing, spinning, dying, weaving, sizing etc., and hundreds of thousands of people work as their employees. They have been spending sleepless nights for fear of threat to their jobs due to persistent loadshedding.
All-Pakistan Textile Processing Mills Association regional chairman Mian Aftab Ahmad has expressed resentment over loadshedding and called it a serious blow to the industry. He said the textile industry had already been facing numerous challenges which had made it incompetitive in the international market.
“If the outages persist, the industry will be in jeopardy and there will be unemployment on a large scale,” he said and urged the Fesco management to devise a comprehensive policy in consultation with the industrialists to ward off loadshedding.
Another textile exporter, Nasir Hanif apprehended that loadshedding could delay the export shipments and cause much damage.
People from other walks of life are equally perturbed as are the stay-at-home people who can’t do any work during power suspension. At night people fight flocks of mosquitoes inside and outside.
Inclement summer has already set in and the power company is resorting to hours-long loadshedding daily. The situation is all the more difficult in villages and far-flung areas where nobody lends a sympathetic ear to the public complaints. Many areas are also facing water shortage due to loadshedding.
During the countrywide loadshedding last year, Fesco had reached an agreement with two private electricity generators to get their surplus production at Rs6.20 per unit. The company had to incur extra financial burden to facilitate its millions of consumers. Despite the costly agreement the situation is not better this year.
Fesco’s newly-appointed chief Ahmad Saeed held a meeting with the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry in December last year. Both parties agreed on more holidays by the business community to meet loadshedding, but to no avail.
A Fesco official told Dawn on the request of anonymity that the officials had been directed to inform the people that “it is load management and not loadshedding” and that was the outcome of water shortfall.
The Fesco chief executive confirmed that they were carrying out load management to save the entire system from collapse. He said all stakeholders would be taken into confidence prior to loadshedding.
Water shortage had forced the company to resort to load management for half an hour to maximum one hour daily, he said.
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