ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will visit Karachi on Monday (today), according to a spokesperson for the PM Office.

The city is again in news, this time over tragic death of hundreds of people caused by an intense heatwave over the past few days.

Amid an increase in power loadshedding and breakdowns coupled with a perception that Sindh government has failed to handle the situation, more than 1,200 people have died from heatwave so far.

Besides presiding over a meeting on the chronic law and order situation in the city, the prime minister will be briefed on the operations of K-Electric which has remained at the centre of a controversy over frequent outages in extreme weather conditions.

The PM will get presented a report on to why Karachi suffered outages when it was provided 650MW from the national grid and K-Electric also generated electricity on its own.

Although some federal ministers went to Karachi last week to express solidarity with grieving families and visited hospitals where heatwave victims were being treated, the prime minister has attracted criticism for not visiting the city.

Federal Minister for Water and Power Khawaja Asif, in a policy statement on the floor of the National Assembly last week, said the federal government was taking K-Electric to the Supreme Court over the stay orders the utility had obtained against the government orders to improve its performance.

In his hard-hitting statement, he said K-Electric was minting profits on the basis of 650MW it received from the national grid on cheep rates and sold to domestic consumers on high charges.

“K-Electric has its own installed capacity to meet electricity requirement of Karachi, but it is not doing so just for profit,” the minister said.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2015

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