HYDERABAD: Thandi Sarak remained blocked and all other thoroughfares leading to it clogged with vehicles for hours as several hundred people took to the streets and assembled at Shahbaz Building on Monday against “inflated bills” sent to them by the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company.

The outraged power consumers were mainly residents of Latifabad and wanted to register their strong protest with the Hesco superintending engineer, who has his office in Shahbaz Building, over the inflated billing.

Former union council nazims, Ibrahim Chishti and Mohammad Ashraf, came forward to represent them in taking up the matter with the official.

The Hesco officials were informed that the protesting consumers belonged to the lower-middle and lower class having not so many electrical gadgets, equipment etc in their houses but were shocked to see their monthly bills amounting to Rs70,000- Rs100,000.

They were further informed that the low-ranking officials supposed to look into the matter were not entertaining their complaints nor were they ready to correct the bills.

Some of the protesters said that the Hesco staff kept threatening them with disconnection if the bills were not paid within the due date knowing that none of the affected consumers was in a position to pay his bill.

Amid the noisy protest, Hesco chief executive officer Saleem Jatt reportedly formed a committee headed by the Circle-I superintending engineer, Malik Imtiaz, to verify each bill and sort out the issue.

A Hesco spokesman claimed that many consumers in this particular area had large residential accommodation with multiple number of air conditioners yet they were getting bills amounting to Rs500-Rs1,000.

He, however, promised that the bills found incorrect by the committee would certainly be corrected.

Mr Chishti, however, told Dawn that no committee had been formed. Rather, he claimed, SE Malik agreed to withdraw all detection bills issued to the consumers living in Allama Iqbal subdivision as all of them belonged to the underprivileged section of society.

Published in Dawn August 18th, 2015

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