Nearly two years since privatisation, Karachiites have seen very little positive change in the electricity situation, despite the promises made about how privatisation would greatly improve the energy situation.
In fact, the weakening performance of the utility has shaped a notion among the public that privatising it may have been a bad idea to begin with.
Despite pervasive remarks by the residential, commercial, business consumers and the concerned authorities, against the performance of KESC, it is unfortunate to see the state of affairs still unchanged. So much so that the Karachiites have started feeling that the utility is a doomed corporation but who can blame them for thinking this way?
However, the city’s power generator and distributor has not always been a difficult concern for the government. On the contrary, the corporation has experienced some very good decades of credibility, reliability and profitability due to its effective performance. But the diminishing investment by the government to upgrade the utility’s powercapacity, rise of corruption, dilapidated infrastructure, power theft, interest deficit among employees and huge financial losses have all attributed to the worsening performance of KESC over the years.
While KESC was a stateenterprise, it was practically running on subsidies, and hence there was no incentive to upgrade the electrical infrastructure of the city; as the facilities included extra electricity from Wapda, there was no need to increase the generation capacity of KESC either. Additionally, the company being governmentthe employee appointment was under political influence, the effects of which are still prevalent in the utility.
However, with the utility being privatised, it is just a norm to assume the new owners of the company to remove those presed functional impediments and breathe a new life into the utility. But rectification of those problems and revamping KESC to supply uninterrupted power supply in the city is a job that requires time and efforts on the company’s part with equal contribution by its consumers.
Where the utility’s own inadequacy in providing stable power supply is the cause of the plight of the Karachiites, to some extent, the consumerfactors are also responsible for aggravating the energy crisis. Such causes include powertheft (kunda connections and meter tampering), lavish consumption of electricity and nonof bills.
Energy loss, both technical and through electricity sabotage have been the principal factors in the gradual deterioration of the company over the years. The component alone is costing the company in the proximity of Rs10 billion annually, which is a major portion of the loss incurred by the company.
Between the pilferage and the technical transmission losses, around one third of KESC’s electrical generation costs yields no revenue. This not only causes inflated electric bills, but also prevents KESC from being properly able to gauge Karachi’s true electric needs causing difficulty in KESC’s ability to invest in the correct places.
Kunda connections, on which much has been said in the last few months, is not the only means of power theft; tampering with electric meters is a common phenomenon that is practiced to reduce the accountability of electricity usage.
Electricity theft is not isolated to rural areas or to big cities. The utility encounters the problem from agricultural operations to housing complexes to business offices and industrial units..
As a developing nation, it is imperative that we realise the importance of simple living to revert the energy crisis. In order to meet our energy requirements, we must adopt the ‘energy conservation’ pattern in our daily lives, which will help mitigate the aggravation of energy crisis. The topnotch of the country are least bothered as they are ‘exempted’ from paying the bills. On the other hand, those who are enjoying the ‘kunda’ connections have no concern as to how much electricity is being wasted as the connection for them is ‘free’. It is not too difficult to guess who pays for these in the end.
On the part of the utility, it is important to constitute a vigilant force in partnership with lawenforcement agencies to curb problems and urge consumers to report any such thefts as a national responsibility.
