HYDERABAD, July 17: The Hesco chief has said that whenever city residents hold a protest demonstration against water shortage, Wasa transfers the blame to the power company on the plea that the water shortage is caused by power breakdown at the water supply pumping stations.

He said that it was in spite of the fact that Hesco had provided three alternate power connections at the Water and Sanitation Agency's filter plant and two connections plus a generator at the Manadhori pumping station. He insisted that actual reason for the short supply of water was that the water pipelines of Wasa were undersized.

Chief Executive of the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company Adeeb-ul-Hassan Rizvi was giving a briefing about the performance of the company to State Minister for Water and Power Khalid Ahmed Lund and journalists at the water wing office of Hesco here on Saturday.

He said that Rs6,700 million electricity charges was outstanding against industrial, commercial and domestic consumers.

He said that although the Sindh government departments had cleared some dues but Rs531 million was still outstanding against different departments of the provincial government. He added that Rs329 million was outstanding against the federal government departments, mainly the Hyderabad Cantonment Board.

He regretted that although the cantonment board was recovering electricity charges from its employees living in its colony, it had failed to deposit the amount with Hesco.

As a result, he said, the employees were holding protest demonstrations against Hesco for disconnecting power supply to their houses.

He said that Hesco had to incur a loss of Rs5.6 million to rehabilitate the power supply system that had been disrupted due to the incidents of sabotage.

Mr Rizvi claimed that the company had taken effective steps to check unnecessary loadshedding and power breakdowns.

He said that in order to redress grievances of consumers in respect of detection bills, a committee comprising of two executive engineers had been constituted to scrutinize detection bills before sending them to consumers.

The Hesco chief said that earlier, detection bills were directly sent to consumers by the SDOs and revenue officers.

He said that a review committee. comprising an superintendent engineer and two executive engineers had also been formed to hear the aggrieved power consumers.