KARACHI, Sept 9: Taking notice of mounting public complaints about power failures, the Karachi Electricity Supply Corporation is planning to launch a state-of-the-art centralized complaint center for consumers.

At present, the centralized complaint centre of the KESC (118) has only 25 telephone lines while the new centre would have 125 lines with a better connectivity to attend consumers.

A KESC spokesman said the operators would be connected through a centralized computerized network where they can forward complaints and monitor progress of work on each complaint.

The conversation would also be recorded for KESC management to hold the operators accountable. He hoped that the new system is likely to start functioning by the first week of next month.

About Saturday’s power situation, he said the power demand is expected up to 1,950mw and it was being met accordingly.

The KESC did not need to resort to power load-shedding on Saturday. However, rain-related faults developed in some areas, including Defence, Clifton, Gulshan-i-Iqbal and others.

“The KESC engineers and workers rectified most of the faults and the remaining are about to be repaired”, he added.

On the other hand, consumers from various localities complained that their localities suffered power outages and the KESC complaint centres did not respond them positively.An irate consumer Salahuddin Khalid from Khayaban-i-Hilal in Defence Phase VI said his locality remained without power for 23 hours. He expressed his dissatisfaction over the performance of the KESC and said that the working of complaint centre was also dismal.

Another consumer from Phase VII said the power supply was suspended at 3:45pm and was restored at 6pm. It was routine that the power supply was suspended once or twice for three to five hours every day, he added.

Dheeraj Kumar from Block-14 in Gulshan-i-Iqbal said the power supply was discontinued at 10pm on Friday and it was restored at 3am on Saturday. He said that the residents of his locality could not sleep without power.

A consumer from Sector 11-H, North Karachi said that the power supply to his locality was suspended at 11am and was restored at 5:45pm.