September 11, 2008	Thursday	Ramazan 10, 1429

KARACHI, Sept 10: As the mercury rose to 40 degrees Celsius, Karachiites had to brave power outages for about eight hours during the day and for a similar duration load-shedding at night as the KESC fell short of over 400 megawatts of electricity on Wednesday.

Indifferent to the consumers’ plight, the privatised management resorted to heavy load-shedding to save on its fuel cost. In fact due to such “inhuman” approach of the utility’s management, people got electricity supply for less than 12 hours in many parts of the city.

The gap in electricity demand and supply crossed well over 400MW, causing long spells of load-shedding throughout the day and night, except during Sehar and Iftar times.

The meteorological department has said the spell of hot and dry weather would persist in the coming days due to the continued influx of the north-north westerly winds, and on Thursday the maximum temperature would range from 38 degrees to 40 degrees Celsius.

The shortfall of electricity has phenomenally increased due to the continued shutdown of a generation unit of the Korangi thermal power plant of the KESC and the Defence Cogen Plant, each producing 80MW of electricity.

There were reports that the KESC had been availing much less input of power generation from the independent power producing companies of Tapal and Gul Ahmed Energy instead of getting the desired electricity generation of 250MW.

Other reports say that there is no power generation input from the generation unit of the Pakistan Steel Mills.

A spokesman for the KESC said that owing to the prevailing harsh weather conditions, the demand of electricity had crossed 2,200MW, causing increased shortage of electricity.

He said the shortage of electricity was likely to increase in the coming days due to the expected severity in weather conditions.

On Wednesday various residential and commercial areas of the city came under at least four spells of load-shedding and each time electricity was shut down for over two hours.

Consumers in many parts of the city said they feared that due to “the callous attitude of the utility’s invisible management”, power riots might break out in may parts of the city as consumers continued to suffer prolonged power outages due to massive erosion in the generating capacity of the KESC and collapse of its distribution system.

In many areas, the KESC complaint centers were not responding to complaints registered against frequent outages. Enraged people in many parts of the city held protest demonstrations and chanted slogans against the utility. Violent reaction against the KESC was also reported from parts of North Karachi, Federal B Area, Landhi, Korangi and Malir. The protesters also demanded that the KESC’s privatisation be reversed and those responsible for the ongoing power crisis should be taken to task.