January 05, 2009	Monday	Muharram 07, 1430

DADU, Jan 4: People on Sunday endured yet another day of prolonged power cuts. The situation affected the functioning of hospitals and a number of surgeries had to be postponed due to non-availability of power.

As the Hyderabad Electricity Supply Company (Hesco) is facing a shortfall of 300 megawatts, it has announced a schedule of six-hour load-shedding in towns and eight hours in rural areas. However, the people are braving 10 to 12 hours of outages daily.

Dadu Civil Hospital’s Civil Surgeon Dr Toufiq Ahmed Memon said that 11 to 12 hours of load-shedding was affecting operations in the hospital.

He said that he had asked local Hesco officials for an uninterrupted supply of power to the hospital but to no avail.

He said that the generator of the hospital could not bear the load of the entire hospital and, therefore, patients were suffering.

The in-charge of the children’s ward of the hospital, Dr Mohammad Ismail Lashari, said that prolonged power cuts were dangerous for babies in neonatal care unit.

It may be mentioned that Sindh Senior Minister Pir Mazharul Haq had at a meeting with Hesco officials directed the superintendent engineer and the executive engineer (operation) of Dadu not to stop power supply to the Civil Hospital.

The minister had also directed them to provide an alternative connection and install a separate transformer to cover the load of the hospital but no action had been taken in this regard.

Apparently due to which, Superintendent Engineer, Dadu, Ghulam Hussain Samoon and Executive Engineer Najam Abro were transferred.

The president of the Dadu Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Ghulam Shah Malkani, said that owing to load-shedding, business activities were badly affected.

A resident of Jagatabad Mohalla, Shauban Qambrani, said that the Hesco was still issuing heavy detection and inflated bills to cover line losses.

The general secretary of the Dadu Flour Mills Association, Sikandar Hussain Lakhair, said that flour mills and chakkis were facing huge losses due to outages.

Hesco spokesman Mohammad Sadiq said that the demand of the company was 1,300MW but it faced a shortfall of 300MW, which was the reason behind the prolonged power cuts.