ISLAMABAD: The newly-constituted Senate Standing Committee on Water and Power plans to call senior officials of K-Electric (KE) to discuss the issue of power cuts that has contributed to hundreds of deaths in Karachi caused by the recent heatwave in the city.

The officials of the utility, it may be pertinent to mention, had refused to attend the meetings of the previous committee.

Talking to Dawn on Saturday, committee chairman Iqbal Zafar Jhagra expressed the hope that the KE officials would this time come to the meeting and apprise the members about their point of view.

The Sindh government has held the KE responsible for the crisis in Karachi, saying that majority of people died because of lengthy outages in the city.

Mr Jhagra said the committee’s secretary had been told to immediately contact the committee members and officials of the KE to ensure their availability in the meeting expected to take place in the first week of July.

When his attention was drawn towards the fact that the KE officials had not been attending the meetings for the past many years, and the previous committee chairman Zahid Khan had even announced that it would issue arrest warrants for the K-Electric chief, Mr Jhagra expressed the hope that this time they would attend the meeting.

“And if they do not come, we will see what we can do,” he added.

Mr Jhagra said the committee was earlier scheduled to meet on July 8 to discuss the issue of loadshedding, but after a letter by Senate Chairman Raza Rabbani asking for a report before the start of the Senate session on July 6, it was decided to call the committee’s meeting on July 2 or 3, depending upon the availability of members.

When contacted, the parliamentary leader of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) in the Senate and a member of the house’s water and power committee, Nauman Wazir, said the previous committee had been summoning the KE officials in a “negative way” whereas they were calling them in a “positive sense”.

Published in Dawn, June 28th, 2015

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