SUKKUR: Electricity consumers have to suffer over 13 hours a day outage in towns and more than 18 hours in rural areas despite scorching summer days, people complain.

They told Dawn on Thursday the Sukkur Electric Power Company (SEPCO) had increased loadshedding hours suddenly and without any formal announcement.

But the power utility’s spokesman Noor Ahmed Soomro insisted that eight hours outage was being carried out in urban areas and 10 hours in rural areas as per ‘schedule of loadshedding’.

Since the SEPCO officials often refer to that invisible schedule to justify prolonged loadshedding this correspondent asked them to provide a copy of it but they avoided to hand it over at one pretext or the other.

The SEPCO officials try to justify unannounced extra hours of loadshedding by the argument that gaps in demand and supply of power were to blame for the nagging problem. Demand suddenly shot up at the start of summer season but supply remained the same, they said.

The consumers’ hardships increased especially during the last week of every month when SEPCO suddenly turned up outage hours at various pretexts in order to cover line losses, said consumers, adding the situation remained the same up to the first week of next month as a matter of routine.

There was no check on theft of electricity which was being stolen on a large scale through kundas which were usually used to run air conditioners and all this was happening under broad daylight in connivance with SEPCO line staff, they said.

They said the consumers who paid their bills regularly had to face hardship on their account.

According to sources in the power utility, power losses of 11KV Shalimar feeder have reached to 70 per cent which means large scale power theft from this feeder.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play