April 15, 2008	Tuesday	Rabi-us-Sani 8, 1429

NAWABSHAH, April 14: The ever-expanding duration of load-shedding which is also unscheduled has made the life awful, both of people and business alike in the district.

The unrelenting power outages for last two months have shattered routine life, along with affecting trade and causing shortage of drinking water with temperature crossing the 42 degree Celsius. All three grid stations are resorting to almost 6-8 hours of load-shedding at selected feeders daily.

Five out of 20 feeders of all three grid stations- including society, hospital, university, Chemi Visco and Nawabshah are exempted while two water supply schemes of the city are also reeling under regular power outage.

Traders too are enraged as load-shedding is inflicting huge financial losses.

They complain that though they were paying heavy bills every month but Hesco failed to supply uninterrupted power supply. They contended that they understand power shortage in the country and were ready to manage with load-shedding if Hesco could announce its schedule.

Officials at a grid stations requesting anonymity told Dawn that they were carrying load shedding on each feeder for 3-4 hours daily which excluded the failure of main supply from Dadu or Hyderabad.

Meanwhile, students of class IX and X staged a demonstration outside press club for unannounced load-shedding, on Sunday.

Students led by Kumail Abbas told reporters that their final exams were scheduled from April 15 to 25 and they were unable to study and prepare for exams due to load-shedding.

They demanded of the authorities to take notice and direct Hesco to mitigate the suffering of people.