Taking advantage of the ongoing strike, many protesting workers of the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) have started a private business of repairing cable faults and are charging exorbitant amounts from citizens for restoring electric supply in their respective areas, Pakistan Today has learnt.
As the power supply situation in the city gets worse due to cable faults, the on-strike KESC workers are minting money from the crises-hit masses by charging up to Rs 3,000 for removing local faults and restoring power supply and the hapless power consumers have no other option but to pay the extortionists for restoration of their electric supply.
Reportedly, the protesting KESC employees have also been thrashing their colleagues, who are assigned for removing cable faults, for continuing their duties.
Early Monday morning, a KESC assistant engineer named Tahir was kidnapped by unidentified armed men while working over a tripped feeder near National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases. The abductors tortured him as a punishment for disobeying the union’s strike call. Tahir was released after six hours of torture but the kidnappers took away his motorcycle.
Late Sunday night, the Lyari Telephone Exchange Sub-Station was torched by some unidentified persons.
Expressing concern over the incident, the KESC spokesperson said that miscreants were destroying the electricity network.
“The technical factors behind the fire at the substation clearly establish that it was an act of sabotage by internal elements and not an accident,” he said.
“Oil was seeping from the drain plug of the transformer, which is only possible if the drain plug is deliberately opened for removing fault or let loose,” he maintained.
Alerting the general public against its corrupt employees extorting money for repairing local faults, the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) on Monday informed the citizens that the same workers were first creating local faults; then delaying and attacking the fault repair system; and finally extorting money by blackmailing the consumers suffering from prolonged outages.
Strongly condemning such anti-social and criminal elements within its ranks for creating a vicious circle, the power utility stated that this issue was behind the ongoing crisis in the KESC and asked the citizens not to pay any amount to any employee for fault repair.
The KESC asked the power consumers to inform the company’s management of the name and identification particulars of any such employees demanding money for repairing local faults at [email protected] or directly report them to the police.
Terming the criminal elements within the utility’s workforce a cancer that had taken deep roots during government control of KESC, the company stated that the same people were involved in theft and illegal use of electricity that had been causing huge financial losses and limiting its ability to transform into a world class public utility.
The statement further stated that the KESC management was fully committed to its values despite all resistance and sabotage, but unless the citizens cooperate and refuse to pay bribes to these extortionists, the menace could not be eradicated.
The KESC also asked the citizens to cooperate against the corrupt officers, as this was the only way miscreants within the system could be exposed and eliminated once and for all.
