The federal government succumbed to violent protests and virtually ‘exempted’ major parts of the city from outages on Tuesday and after three days of protests, finally the city remained quite and calm.
The Pakistan Electric Power Company (PEPCO) also reduced the power supply to the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) to overcome the crisis in Punjab while oil supplies to HUBCO and KAPCO also improved. Many parts of the city including Johar Town, Township, Model Town, Garden Town, Muslim Town, Allama Iqbal Town, Wahdat Road and others got power supplies continuously from morning to evening and some areas such as Mughalpura, Shalimar, Baghbanpura, Samanabad, Yateem Khana, Chouburji, Ravi Road and others witnessed fewer outages. But the duration of power cuts in these areas remained less than six hours while rural areas of LESCO faced 10 hours of power cuts. It also provided a sigh of relief to the masses and violent protesters, who were on the roads for the last three days.
Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leaders also remained calm after reduction in load shedding and possible call of a long march was looking doubtful. Consumers showed surprise over reduction in load shedding asking one another how it was possible that suddenly there was electricity all day. They said that the federal government should take the problem seriously and find long term solutions so that similar situations did not take place in the future.
Partly load shedding in different parts of the city helped LESCO to overcome the shortfall it was facing. LESCO was facing around 500MW shortfall on Tuesday, which it overcame through load shedding in some parts. In the last three days, LESCO was facing more than 1,000MW shortfall. With improvement in electricity flows from PEPCO, load shedding reduced. It was enough to normalise consumers, who showed their ‘happiness’ over reduction outages.
The mood of the city also changed and once giving a scene of war-field, the city came to normal. Businesses also started as usual and no protest was reported in any part of the city. “I am surprised that how load shedding was reduced only in one day,” banker Jabar Ahmed said, adding that it means there was no problem in electricity generation and only payments to the power producers was the issue. He said that the federal government should overcome the circular debt issue and there would be no load shedding.
