KARACHI: Pakistan People’s Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto on Tuesday warned the power producers in Sindh to stop over-billing consumers, saying the residents won’t tolerate this victimisation.
In a statement issued here, Bilawal said he was informed that K-Electric had switched from copper to silver cables. He also asked the Hyderabad and Sukkur electric supply companies to improve their performance without any delay.
He said K-Electric was only minting money and fleecing the people of Karachi without supplying electricity. The company, he said, had the capacity to generate electricity well above 2,000 megawatts.
K-Electric, however, generates only 400 megawatts through gas-fired power plants and has practically shut down its furnace oil power plants to save billions of rupees in profits, he said.
The PPP chairman said Lyari, Kharadar, Keamari and other poor localities of Karachi were specially being targeted with 8-12 hours of power outages, adding that the residents of Lyari were even compelled to hold a protest outside the office of K-Electric.
He said the federal government was intentionally creating electricity shortfall to victimise the people and divert their attention from the Panama revelations and other misdeeds of the Sharif government.
Electricity need of the country is 23,700 megawatts, but the total power generation capacity being generated is 23,600 megawatts, he said, adding that in reality there was a meagre shortfall of just 100 megawatts.
“But the federal government and its electric companies have inflicted an artificial shortfall of 7,000mw upon the people during the severe heat wave the country is undergoing nowadays,” he added.
Bilawal said the federal government paid hundreds of billions of rupees circular debt and, in some cases, the extra payments were made to the IPPs but still it was imposing artificial load shedding on the consumers to burn them in the scorching heat.
He further said that Sindh was producing surplus electricity but its length and breadth had been subjected to unbearable power outages by the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) government.
