Consumers voice concern over K-E’s poor performance

MUHAMMAD SHAFA

KARACHI: Complaints about K-Electric’s indifferent attitude towards resolving consumers’ issues continued to pour in to newspaper offices.

Residents of different areas said that their complaints - ranging from prolonged loadshedding to PMT faults and from excessive billing to wire snapping cases - either remained unheeded for days together or resolved after a considerable period.

They said that whenever they lodged their complaints about power failure or prolonged loadshedding, K-E officials manning Customers Care Centre (118) would either not bother to respond to their calls or give stereo-typed answer that the work was continuing to remove faults and their power would be restored in due course of time.

Moreover, K-E Customers Care Center’s staff has made it a habit not to give complaint numbers to consumers, they added.

With regard to excessive billing, consumers complained that whenever they approached the concerned office of K-E to get their bills rectified, they are told to deposit the `inflated’ bills within due dates and the excessive amount would be adjusted against their next month’s bills.

A resident of Paposh Nagar complained that more than 20 houses in his locality remained without electricity on Sunday as the K-E staff took eight hours to rectify a cable fault and that too after a number of complaints were lodged with the power utility’s Customers Care Centre.

A similar complaint of inordinate delay in rectifying the fault of a cable breakdown was received from the residents of Surjani Town’s Sector L-1.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for K-Electric said that the power utility’s Customer Care Center was working satisfactorily, providing relief to the consumers in resolving their power-related issues.

Insisting that angry protest demonstrations staged in localities over non-availability of electricity often created hindrances in rectifying faults, he claimed that the power utility with a view to providing uninterrupted power supply has already introduced power distribution network standards.