June 01, 2008	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 26, 1429

KARACHI, May 31: As citizens brave for the austerity measures and “conserve energy plan”, under which clocks are being advanced by an hour at Saturday-Sunday midnight to encourage maximum use of daylight, the metropolis experienced several spells of hours-long load-shedding on Saturday amid suffocating humid weather conditions.

In many parts of the city, people endured power cuts running into more than eight hours on Friday night and Saturday. Students appearing in HSC examinations and the industrialists worried about meeting deadlines of production and shipments were the worst hit while traders’ associations have been holding consultations to “respond suitably” to the KESC’s indifferent attitude towards the heavy losses they have been suffering due to the day and night power cuts of long duration. On top of the suggestions under active consideration appeared to be stopping payment of electricity bills until the restoration of an uninterrupted power supply to bazaars, markets and industrial units.

Many of the agitated businessman community leaders even appeared to be ready to defy the government’s conserve energy plan, that curtails evening business timings, to be effective from Sunday.

Commenting on the “good news” that the load-shedding will come to an end by 2009, most of the businessman community leaders said that they had been getting similar messages over the past 10 years but the ground reality was the that the power crisis has been deepening with every passing day.

The KESC suffered the latest setback when one of its recently repaired unit at the Bin Qasim power plant got its boiler leaked and stopped generating power, caused a considerable shortfall. The KESC could not churn out enough energy from its plants which resulted in a heavy shortfall.

Insiders say that the generation shortfall was also due to the KESC management’s policy of cutting oil expenses.

The management has also failed to invest in power generation and transmission & distribution (T&D) system although it had committed an investment of $400 million at the time of taking over the utility.

At the moment, the utility is running into an accumulated loss of Rs40 billion.

The previous KESC management had submitted a plan to the government under which Rs13.5 billion was sanctioned for extensive upgrading of its T&D system. About Rs4 billion was utilised and the remaining Rs9.5 billion was placed at the disposal of the new management, which eventually shelved the proposed projects.