K-Electric must do better

One-one-eight. These are the three digits Karachiites have dialed more than any other in the past few days. No less than eight major power breakdowns have happened in less than a week in the mega city. Worse still, it has coincided with Ramadan and the troubles of commoners multiply. And the reasons have varied from one breakdown to another – from NTDC grid issues to EHT line tripping to just ‘technical’ faults.

K-Electric has invited heavy criticism from all corners, and much of it is not uncalled for. Granted that the temperatures are high, and not every time is KE responsible for the national grid issues. But KE cannot forever play the victim card and get scot free. KE has been given its free share of due credit for improved performance indicators over the years, higher efficiency, greater profitability, and customer service.

But let’s not forget the fact that it remains a utility company, an integrated one at that, that too in a city as important as Karachi. The fact remains that KE has miserably failed to supply uninterrupted power generation to Karachi. If that is too much to ask for, it has also of late failed to curtail unannounced load shedding. And when the chips are down, the customer support refuses to answer, and that coming from a private firm making sizeable profits, is simply unacceptable.

Reasons might be financial, political, technical or all of them – KE has been a private limited company for long enough to have outlined a better plan than the one being executed. Yes, the city has expanded to no bounds, but KE should have known that, while taking up a challenge like Karachi. Simply repeating the mantra of selective load shedding and penalizing high-loss areas, served for a while, will not anymore.

Enough power needs to be generated and supplied safely to the end consumers. People have developed the tolerance level to even accept ‘scheduled’ outages, which seem to have made KE into a complacent company. People expect more from someone operating in the private zone to have better mechanisms than the one currently in place for load shedding.

Not that the situation around the country is any better, and the federal government gets it share of public’s wrath. As much as KE’s privatization for the most part has been a success story, repeated occurrences of such magnitude, would force people question KE’s privatization. And that could be tricky as the Chinese are yet to take the control over.