LAHORE: Opposition leader in Punjab Assembly Mian Mahmoodur Rasheed on Wednesday wrote a letter to the prime minister and the Punjab chief minister on the announced and unannounced loadshedding in the country.

In his letter, Mr Rasheed has written about the PML-N government’s claims about ending loadshedding in its manifesto and leaders’ speeches at public meetings. Later, he said the PML-N government’s deadlines continued increasing.

He said the government claimed that loadshedding completely ended in Punjab, while it was yet to overcome in other three provinces.

Referring to some documents, the opposition leader said the government declared 4,971 feeders free of loadshedding, including 83.4 per cent feeders in Punjab and 16.6pc in other parts of the country. In Sindh, he said, 4.1pc feeders were declared loadshedding free, 5pc in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 1.22pc in Quetta.

He said the Lahorites were facing six-hour loadshedding on the pretext of work on the Orange Line project. He said people had already started protesting against unannounced outages in different cities.

In the second part of the letter, Rasheed has addressed the chief minister and asked about the gap in generation and supply of power, despite setting up small plants in the province.

In the third part, he demanded that the Punjab government publicly correct details of ongoing and completed power generation plants. He said the chief minister should apologise to the people of Punjab for his failure in ending loadshedding. He demanded that the financial irregularities in power generation and energy projects should be investigated by a judicial commission.

Published in Dawn, April 5th, 2018