LAHORE: The Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco) may refer the issue of pending electricity connections to the National Accountability Bureau or the Federal Investigation Agency if power distribution companies do not address the situation.

The Pepco managing director has warned this in a letter to the chief executive officers of the distribution companies.

According to official sources, there is a backlog of over one million applications related to new connections and replacement of defective metres in all Discos.

Discos’ chief executive officers (CEOs) also told Federal Minister (Power Division) Awais Leghari about the issue in a meeting on Dec 22 in Lahore that they needed about one million metres every month to clear the backlog and disposal of future applications.

NAB, FIA may be asked to conduct probe: Pepco

Now, the Pepco boss directed the CEOs to speed up installation of connections without unnecessary delay. “Early installation of connections will avoid the loss of revenue,” the letter states.

“Being a competent authority, all CEOs have adequate powers to take such decisions without any limit of connection, power/load etc in their respective service areas,” he added.

He directed the Discos’ top bosses to facilitate the consumers at all levels in the light of their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are evaluated on fortnightly or monthly basis.

Other KPIs include the mobile metre reading and its implementation status, registration of consumers’ mobile phone numbers, billing schedule and delay, variance in metre reading, impact on line losses, overall financial impact, accuracy certificate from field officers/officials, number of defective metres, pending new connections’ applications, metres required and progress on development work.

At present, consumers in all Discos are over 12 million.

About two per cent of the meteres develop defects and need replacement time to time. About 500,000 applications for the replacement of defective meters and more or less the same number of new electricity connection applications are lying pending with Discos. Every month, the number of such applicants goes up.

Published in Dawn, January 2nd, 2018