PPP sends KESC’s performance report to Zardari

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 By Tahir Hasan Khan Karachi President Asif Ali Zardari has reportedly taken serious note of continued power breakdowns in Karachi and a team of senior Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leaders has sent a detailed report to him regarding the power crises in the city, sources told The News. They said that the PPP leadership had complained to the President during his recent visit to Karachi about the fact that citizens were facing the worst kind of power crisis and the management of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation (KESC) had miserably failed to overcome it. The president was reportedly informed that the KESC management had misguided the government by saying that the reason for the power crisis was owing to technical faults in the distribution system. President Zardari was informed that the Sindh Assembly speaker and some other party ministers had visited the head office of the KESC but no high-up from the management was present in the main office and the KESC authorities were not bothered to give satisfactory answers to elected representatives. After the complaint and media reports about the power crisis, the president had sought a detailed report from party leaders. Sources said it was said in the report that the power crisis was not technical and instead the KESC management was trying to force and pressure the government to provide it the company with electricity from Wapda rather than generating the electricity from the Bin Qasim Unit. The report said that the power crisis in the city was ‘artificial’ just to get more electricity from Wapda on subsidised rates. It further said that the KESC had shut down three major power generating units at Bin Qasim, citing technical faults. Any fault which required rectification in the generating unit could not take more than a week, even if parts were imported, the report said, adding that the KESC had been claiming for more than two weeks that three power generating units of Bin Qasim were out of order. The party report claimed that in fact the KESC had shut its three units deliberately just to save its profit as these three units were run on furnace oil, while three other units of Bin Qasim power plant use gas to generate electricity and the Sui Southern Gas Company was providing gas to the KESC. The capacity of each KESC unit to generate electricity was 200MW and after shutting of three units, the shortfall of the electricity has touched 600MW. According to the report, the Wapda was providing 600MW electricity to the KESC at a rate of Rs3.70 per unit while the cost of electricity generation from furnace oil was Rs12.70 and the KESC wanted to build pressure on the government to provide further 600MW from the Wapda just to save billions of rupees profit. The report pointed out that the company which took over the control of the KESC was running the business from its private office in a non-professional style and they wanted to adopt tactics to blackmail the elected government. The report further stated that there were power riots in the city due to the hot weather and this crisis would defame the government and create a law and order situation. The party has requested President Zardari to direct the minister concerned to investigate the matter first and take action against those responsible.