KARACHI, Nov 12: The customer service centres of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company have been left unsupervised to such an extent that subscribers seeking to get their faulty telephone lines repaired have to wait for months before their complaints are attended to. In many cases, their complaints go completely unattended.

Sources told Dawn on Friday that low-ranking officials, as well as divisional engineers, often tell subscribers that they would attend to complaints only if the spirit moved them. The sources said the divisional engineers were not held accountable for the rising number of complaints in their telephone exchanges.

They said both the southern telecommunications regions in Karachi were equally bad in looking to the complaints of subscribers, but STR-II was also late in giving new connections.

The sources said that the performance of the New Karachi Exchange and the Orangi Town Exchange was so poor that at a recently concluded general managers' conference in Karachi, it was decided that these two exchanges would be upgraded.

Mohammad Rizwan, a PTCL subscriber of the Orangi Town exchange, told Dawn that he got a complaint of his faulty phone line (6696176) registered at the complaint centre on Sept 23. Showing a PTCL receipt of the complaint, he said the previous week, he went to the complaint centre again to lodge a complaint.

"The customer services divisional engineer of the PTCL's Orangi Town exchange told me that he would not rectify this fault. The PTCL official told me in no uncertain terms that the phone would remain out of order as long as he wanted to," he said.

A PTCL subscriber of the Federal B Area Exchange told Dawn that his telephone line (6326835) had been out of order for the past two months. He added that his family had lodged numerous complaints with the phone exchange but to no avail. He recalled that in the past faulty phone connections were rectified promptly.

Another complainant told Dawn that he had applied for a phone connection with the Cant Exchange of the PTCL on July 28. "Every time I go to the PTCL exchange, they tell me that there is no telephone line available.

"Some time back the PTCL was issuing connections free of cost to subscribers. And now it has no connections for those who are willing to pay. A PTCL official told me that if I paid the lineman of the area a little sum, I could get a phone connection," he said. Dawn tried to contact the STR-II general-manager, Muzaffar Ali, but he was not available for comments.

However, a PTCL spokesman said all those complaints which entered the PTCL fault rectification system were rectified sooner or later. He added that PTCL subscribers were fully satisfied with the performance of the phone utility.