October 16, 2008	Thursday	Shawwal 16, 1429

KARACHI, Oct 15: Despite winning a term financing facility of Rs15 billion as approved by the federal cabinet’s Economic Coordination Committee and also getting the utility’s shares transferred to it from its predecessor, the Abaraj-led management of the Karachi Electric Supply Company KESC has failed to contain load-shedding in any part of the city.

The ECC had given its approval to the bailout proposal to enable the KESC to pay off the longstanding liabilities of Kapco, Hubco and PSO.

However, all other stakeholders, mainly power consumers, have been reacting angrily to the government’s move to bail out the new KESC management from the public exchequer.

They also questioned the rationale behind the ECC decision when no accountability of the Abaraj predecessors, the Al Jomaih, had been done regarding over Rs10 billion passed on to them for the purpose of system improvement at the time of the utility’s privatisation.

The Al Jomaih had not even been asked whey didn’t they make their promised investment to improve the KESC’s transmission and distribution systems.

Emboldened by strong patronage in the government, the Abaraj-led management is also continuing with the KESC’s insufficient generation capacity and not availing the IPP source to the maximum to minimise the persisting load-shedding.

The new KESC spokesman, Qashif Effendi, had held out the assurance that the utility would soon optimise its power generation through its own sources and the IPP support but the city has still been experiencing long spells of power outage.

In most areas, these spells run into six to eight hours while several other areas endure even longer outages.

The electricity continues to play hide and seek for many days as it did in the past.

Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Gulistan-i-Jauhar, North Nazimabad, Lyari, Malir, Saddar, PECHS and DHA are among the areas badly affected by the outages.

Officially, the load-shedding is being carried out in different areas on a rotation basis thrice a day, with each spell being stretched over two hours.