Hapless citizens of Karachi face immense troubles in this hot and humid weather, as Karachi Electric Supply Company has further increased it tormenting loadshedding. In some areas the consumers even brave no-electricity situation in night hours and pass sleepless and agonising nights.
On the night between Saturday and Sunday Sachal Goth and surrounding areas of Union Council-12 Gulshan-e-Iqbal town braved electricity outage from the evening till Fajr prayer calls. Elderly people, small children, women and men equally braved a torturous situation in hot and humid weather and cured their fate. The same situation was witnessed also in many other areas of the city, where hour-long load shedding had created acute shortage of water.
Strangely, the consumers do not get electricity for 10 to 12 hours a day, but the electricity bills sent to them show monthly charges of several thousands of rupees. The baffled citizens are at loss of understanding why they are being fleeced in the crude and cruel manner in a country with an elected government, independent judiciary and free media.
They ask why the government is giving subsidies of billions of rupees to the KESC, which is not a citizens-friendly humanitarian service provider entity, a privately owned and profit-oriented firm. They ask whether this is a reward for bad performance or a political nepotism at the cost of taxpayers' money. Pakistan Peoples Party leader and People Workers Union KESC chapter general secretary Latif Mughal says the KESC gets subsidies of billions of rupees from the federal government in the name of Karachiites, but it has failed to either serve its consumers or doing justice to its workers.
The Karachiites demand of the political parties of both treasury and opposition benches, media, human rights organisations, and apex judiciary to look into the real causes of persisting and aggravating loadshedding and inflated bills and save the citizens from mental torture and agony besides theft of their money in the name of inflated bills for electricity supply they seldom get regularly and uninterruptedly.