PESHAWAR, May 18: Reacting to prolonged power suspensions, residents of various localities here on Saturday held protest demonstrations and shouted anti-government slogans.

The power consumers at Ganj, Lahori and Gari Khana areas held protest demonstrations against power outages and warned to block G.T. Road by observing a sit-in to force the government on taking steps for ensuring smooth power supply to the areas.

The complainants said that the feeder meant for Ganj, Gari Khana and Lahori had been linked to the Badbher and Hazar Khwani feeders. They said that this was injustice with them because people of rural localities like Badbher had to face additional loadshedding due to the defaulting consumers.

“The Wapda is sending us inflated bills every month, but power supply is next to nil because electricity remains suspended for about 20 hours daily,” said Nasir Khan, who led the protestors at City Circular Road. He said that power outages had led to serious shortage of water in different localities and people were being faced with many problems as they had to fetch water from far-off tube wells.

Similarly, residents of Shaheen Colony also expressed grave concern over power outages and demanded that the area should be linked to Swati Patak feeder instead of Bazidkhel and Badbher.

In a joint statement, the area people demanded that Peshawar Electric Supply Company accept the demand because they were regularly paying their power bills.