Pano Aqil residents block National Highway to protest prolonged outages

SUKKUR: The residents of Pano Aqil tehsil took to the streets Sunday against prolonged load-shedding, blocking the National Highway for traffic.

According to the protesters, they were facing 18 to 20 hours long outages but the officials of Sukkur’s power utility, Sukkur Electric Power Company (SEPCO), were not lending an ear to their complaints.

Instead of solving power issues Sepco officials were busy asking for bribe to fix a transformer that has been lying dysfunctional since the past few days, the protesters alleged.

However, Sepco officials said duration of load-shedding in Pano Aqil tehsil of Sukkur district was eight hours. They added only those areas were facing prolonged outages were line losses were greater.

During Sunday’s protest, locals not only demonstrated on the National Highway but also blocked it for traffic by placing uprooted trees on both sides of the road near Sangi. The protest resulted in long queues of vehicles waiting on the thoroughfare.

Besides Sukkur, prolonged outages have continued to plague Karachi as well, which authorities said have been caused by faults in Bin Qasim Power Plant, responsible to supply electricity to the city.

The metropolis is faced with a shortfall of 600MW-700MW due to the power plant breakdown, leading to unannounced load-shedding in the areas that were previously exempted from power outages.

While addressing the issue at Supreme Court’s Karachi registry a day earlier, Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Mian Saqib Nisar remarked that load-shedding is criminal negligence.

‘Load-shedding is criminal negligence,’ CJP enraged over Karachi power crisis

Supreme Court summons the load-shedding schedule of the city

At the hearing, the top judge summoned chief executive officer of K-Electric, city’s sole power utility, Tayyab Tareen.

The CJP ordered the power utility authorities to make the court aware of the entire situation pertaining to outages by May 20.