FAISALABAD, Aug 30: Members of the Faisalabad Electricity Supply Company (Fesco) advisory board staged a protest demonstration outside the company headquarters here on Saturday after the chief executive expressed his inability to control the hours-long unscheduled loadshedding for the time being.

The advisory board meeting held under the chairmanship of Fesco Chief Executive Ahmad Saeed Akhtar to plan loadshedding schedule.

The government had recently constituted the advisory board consisting of industrialists attached with different sectors mostly with the textile area to help Fesco plan loadshedding schedule.

Sources privy to the meeting told Dawn that board members asked the Fesco chief executive to refrain from unannounced power suspension which had been creating problems for domestic as well as commercial consumers. They said the situation could land the industrialists into a difficult situation, raising their financial losses and rendering thousands of workers jobless.

The industrialists urged Akhtar to devise a schedule with the consent of entrepreneurs and follow it strictly, but he expressed his inability to do so. The advisory board members also asked the Fesco chief to treat all consumers without any discrimination.

The Fesco chief, sources said, expressed his inability to arrest the current wave of outages and said the company had been distributing the electricity according to directives it received from Islamabad. However, he said, efforts were being made to overcome the loadshedding.

His responses could not satisfy the advisory board members who came out of the chief executive’s office and staged a protest demonstration. They also called their fellows who reached there carrying banners and placards.

They chanted slogans against Fesco and demanded across-the-board and scheduled loadshedding, activation of the advisory board, termination of any sort of independent feeders and enhancement of Faisalabad electricity quota.

Addressing the protesters, Shafiq Ahmed, Waheed Khaliq and others threatened that they would stage a demonstration again at the same place on Monday if their demands were not heeded.