KARACHI: Residents of Lyari staged a violent protest against prolonged load-shedding in their area on Wednesday and blocked both tracks of Mauripur Road, stopping vehicular traffic and forcing police to fire tear gas shells and baton charge the protesters to clear the road.

A large number of people, including women and children, staged a sit-in on Mauripur Road near Dua Hotel. The protesters blocked one of the busiest arteries in the city.

Zohaib Baloch, vice chairman of UC-7 in Lyari, one of the organisers of the protest, told Dawn that residents of Lyari were facing up to 16 hours of load shedding on a daily basis, which aggravated the water crisis in the locality.

He said the police resorted to baton charge and fired tear gas at protesters to disperse them.

Men, women and children take to street over prolonged load-shedding, hefty electricity bills

However, the local leader added that their protest would continue till the fulfilment of their demand pertaining to the restoration of power supply to the city’s oldest neighbourhood.

He said residents also protested at another venue at Mira Naka in Lyari to protest the same problem.

A police officer, who wished not to be named, said that the police dispersed the protesters and got the important Mauripur Road cleared to traffic.

The police claimed that they were compelled to take action when the protesters started ‘smashing’ cars and other vehicles on the road.

A local leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party in Lyari, which is considered a PPP stronghold in the metropolis, Aslam Samoo, dissociated his party from Wednesday’s protest.

Mr Samoo said that some ‘non-political elements’ of Lyari had chosen the day when the PPP was observing 5th July — a day of removal of the party’s founder and former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by general Ziaul Haq in a coup.

Karachi Press Club president Saeed Sarbazi, who is also an old resident of Lyari, said that the KE might have reasons to resort to load-shedding on the pretext of ‘losses’, but a host of issues needed to be taken into consideration for the resolution of this problem.

He said that the mushroom growth of high-rises led to serious overcrowding in the area besides aggravating civic problems in the locality, he added.

He said that mostly the people with a working-class background lived in Lyari, who could not afford exorbitant electricity bills and it required that an initiative was taken by political and social organisations to address this issue.

The KE did not issue any statement on the situation in Lyari.

However, a day ago it explained that it conducted periodic assessments of its feeders for losses and recoveries.

“As of now, over 70pc of KE`s network receives constant power supply. The remainder are areas where electricity is stolen and bills against actual consumption remain unpaid, yet the company continues to supply power to these regions for 14 hours a day,” it added.

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2023