KHYBER: Tribal Areas Electric Supply Company (Tesco) has disconnected power supply to security installations in Landi Kotal Cantonment and district headquarters hospital over non-payment of outstanding bills.

Officials at Landi Kotal grid station said that they served a number of notices on both the government institutions for payment of the outstanding bills but their notices were ignored every time and they had to disconnect power supply to both those installations with orders of their high-ups.

They said that Frontier Corps owed Rs81.8 million to Tesco while the district headquarters hospital was to pay Rs145 million to the power supply company.

Officials said that they had clear cut instructions of their high-ups to expedite recovery of the outstanding bills from all the government departments working in merged districts. They added that they had been holding meetings with heads of those departments for early payment of bills to avoid disconnection of power supply.

They said that final notices were served on both the FC officials and the hospital administration on March 18 for prompt payment of their bills but they failed to comply with the notices on the pretext of shortage of funds.

Tesco officials said that no leniency would be shown to any government department if it failed to deposit the arrears as the company could no more afford to provide free electricity to anyone in the current circumstances.

Meanwhile, acting medical superintendent of district headquarters hospital Dr Zafar contended that they had been regularly paying bills in instalments and would do so in coming months to avoid any default.

He, however, said that they had requested the grid station staff to install the power meter on the hospital premises as it was fixed at the grid station. He alleged that electricity was supplied illegally to a number of places from the power line of the hospital.

He said that grid station staff was charging hospital for those illegal connections, which needed to be immediately removed and the meter should be installed at the hospital.

Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2024