KARACHI, April 20: Army officials running the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation do not bat an eyelid while admitting that the transmission and distribution losses of the power utility have risen to 40 per cent.
In May 1999, when the army took over the KESC management, the transmission and distribution losses had stood at 38.64 per cent.
While the army-run KESC administration continues to crow about its success in recovering outstanding dues from defaulters, it downplays the fact that it has failed to reduce the transmission and distribution losses.
Browsing through the KESC audit reports issued in the past four years, one finds amusing tall claims made by the army in the power utility. The alleged inefficiency of the former civilian administration, whose only fault was that it did not don army uniforms, has been a familiar refrain with the army over the past four years.
The 1999 audit report quotes the KESC chairman, Zulfikar Ali Khan, a retired lieutenant general, as saying: “The present management took control of the KESC towards the end of May 1999. It was confronted with a formidable task as the existing system was nearing collapse. Since it was not possible to attend to all the problems simultaneously, the essential areas were identified and priorities fixed. The most important issue was to provide immediate relief to the customers of the KESC by arranging adequate power to overcome shortage of generation, the main cause of loadshedding. This was managed through cooperation of Wapda which not only supplied the much-needed electrical energy but also favoured the KESC by deferring the demand for payment for the power supplied...Keeping in view the reducing trend of losses in the 1st quarter, the target for losses for the whole FY 1999-2000 has been fixed at 30 per cent.”
The KESC chairman, based in Lahore, should be asked why the army-run Wapda had not cooperated with the KESC — by supplying ”the much-needed electrical energy” — when it had been run by a civilian management. He should also be asked why the army in Wapda had waited for their brethren to assume power in the KESC to defer the demand for payment for the power supplied. He should also be asked why no heads had rolled — despite the much-trumpeted system of accountability of the army — when the power utility had failed to meet the target of the reduction in the transmission and distribution losses.
Army officials in the KESC are on record as saying that out of the 40 per cent total transmission and distribution losses, about 18 per cent are technical losses, such as copper losses, inductive losses and resistive losses. But they shy away from conceding that under international standards a transmission and distribution network as large as that of the KESC would have only six to seven per cent technical losses.
In the latest half-yearly report issued by the power utility, the KESC managing director, Brig Tariq Saddozai, shrugs off his shoulders, as it were, and says that the transmission and distribution losses cannot be reduced unless the government makes the funds required available. He says: “As intimated in the annual report, preliminary work on the project of reduction of the transmission and distribution losses has been completed, the physical implementation of the plan will start shortly depending upon receipt of funds from the government of Pakistan.”
However, he omits to mention that a 250-strong army monitoring team and 33 army officers working in the KESC have done very little to check power pilferage, largely responsible for the high transmission and distribution losses.
For the past four years, the chartered accountants of the KESC, first Rahim Jan & Co and Sidat Hyder Qamar & Co and now Ford Rhodes Sidat Hyder & Co, have been writing one sentence in their audit reports. The sentence, which appears in audit reports without change of punctuation marks, reads: “One of the factors attributable to these [transmission and distribution] losses is the alleged theft of electricity, which has directly affected the profitability of the Corporation. These factors, if controlled effectively, may enable the Corporation to minimize its overall losses.”
The rationale of bringing the army in the KESC was that it would effect a turnaround in the power utility’s fortunes. Evidently, this has not happened, proving that the army is no all-purpose troubleshooter. It is about time a civilian administration is restored to the power utility. Let us not forget that after all civilians had run the KESC since its establishment in 1913 till May 1999.