LARKANA, June 18: “The more you pay the more you suffer” seems to be the fate of legitimate consumers in Larkana and Qambar-Shahdadkot districts where the power utility makes them pay for the stolen units and line losses besides subjecting them to protracted loadshedding, low voltage and inflated bills.

In Larkana, most of the power feeders tripped sporadically throughout the day and the consumers could hardly get half an hour’s continuous supply in many areas.

Every half an hour some feeder tripped and the voltage suddenly dropped, causing irreparable damages to electrical appliances, reports from Shahdadkot and Qambar said.

Even when the temperature in Larkana rises to 48 to 50 degrees Celsius and people are made to spend sleepless nights there is no letup in power shutdown. Hours long outages have not only affected routine life but also inflicted heavy losses on trade activities, with patients and prisoners the worst sufferers.

The inmates in central prison suffer from various skin diseases, mainly caused by overcrowding and made worse by prolonged power shutdowns. Even the patients in hospitals under the Chandka Medical College are not spared.

The local officials of Hyderabad Electricity Supply Company (Hesco) give a clichéd and oft-repeated answer whenever they are asked about the cause of such protracted loadshedding.

They usually blame the feeder-tripping and low voltage on a ‘fault’ in the system and ‘overload’ and low power supply from grid stations.

It is learnt that to save energy, the company has installed what it calls ‘de-fittings’ at certain points to cut power supply to specific areas whenever it so desires.

Sources in the revenue department of Hesco disclosed that that there were only 107,000 legal connections in City-I and II areas for which energy bills were issued regularly while according to a rough estimate there were about 400,000 houses in both the areas, which indicated that more than 200,000 houses were either without power or they had illegal connections.

The company thus shifts the stolen power load to its legitimate consumers and set off line losses, which were more than 60 per cent in Larkana, by ‘over-booking’ of units, the sources said.

The over-booking affected payments to 50 per cent and kept moving up the graph of ‘outstanding’ arrears against consumers.

Many consumers complained that Hesco officials silently added air conditioner charges to selective consumers’ bills no matter he was a waiter or a daily-wager while many linemen preferred to remain in offices instead of being in the field curbing theft and line losses.

The menace of ‘detection’ bills was also rampant in both the divisions, with bill-correction made a Herculean task for the consumers who usually had to visit Hesco offices for months to get a bill corrected, the sources said.

In addition, the ‘arrears’ graph continues to move up and at present Hesco has to recover Rs1,908,186,500 as outstanding dues against consumers in Larkana circle.

The arrears stood at Rs1,734,341,500, in 2007 and the volume of outstanding dues kept increasing almost every year, the sources said.