PESHAWAR, March 1: The Tribal Electric Supply Company (Tesco) on Thursday demanded of its consumers to pay their utility bills because the utility suffered a monthly loss of about Rs900 million in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas due to bad debt.

A spokesman for Tesco said in a statement that if the bills were paid in a timely fashion, considerable money could be invested in development and maintenance schemes. All the feeders and grid stations supplying electricity to the North and South Waziristan agencies were overloaded due to unaccounted for consumption, he said.

Load management measures were being taken to save the system from collapse, said the Tesco spokesman. He characterised load-shedding in the two agencies as a “self-created problem”. The problem of load management would be resolved if the consumers adopted precautionary measures.—PPI