HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad Chamber of Small Traders and Small Industry (HCSTSI) on Saturday joined protesting power consumers in condemning the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (Hesco) for excessive loadshedding and failing to control local faults causing the outages to stretch to 20 hours a day in certain areas of the city.

HCSTSI president Mohammad Akram Ansari and other office-bearers held a meeting in the chamber’s office to take stock of the situation and observed that the outages had not only brought intolerable miseries to people affecting their routine life but also cased an acute shortage of water in the holy month of Ramazan.

The meeting noted with concern that Hesco, as well as the federal government, had promised that no loadshedding would be carried out during the Sehr and Iftar timings but the practice had become ruthless covering both timings in most areas while outages on account of localised faults, breakdown of pole-mounted transformers and other reasons had reduced the supply time to a few hours a day.

In most areas, consumers were facing outages of 10 hours in many spans and the worst-hit areas were receiving electricity for just four hours a day, it observed.

The meeting noted that the businessman community, traders, shopkeepers were extremely worried over the situation that had ruined their business.

It also observed that tanker operators were supplying poor quality water at exorbitant rates taking advantage of a shortage.

The leaders urged the federal minister of state for water and power, Sindh chief minister, Hyderabad commissioner, Hesco chief executive officer and Water and Sanitation Agency managing director to look into the fast worsening situation in the city and the plight of citizens in the holy month.

Meanwhile, residents of Bhitai Town on Saturday took to the streets against unavailability of electricity in their area for two weeks.

They told the media outside the Bhitai Nagar police station that local officials of Hesco were not paying any attention to their complaints and woes. They also tried to lodge a complaint at the police station against the Hesco sub-divisional officer concerned.

On his part, the SDO, Sohail Shaikh, speaking to Dawn claimed that the area recorded 98 per cent electricity theft which prompted the power utility to ignore the local consumers’ complaints.

He said a total of Rs80 million had to be recovered from defaulters in Bhitai Town.

Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2016