After giving a day’s relief to the people of Lahore, PEPCO went back to conducting 12-hour power outages in the provincial capital, as demonstrations against unscheduled load shedding continued across Punjab on Wednesday. PEPCO MD Rasul Khan Mehsud tried to conceal the facts by giving false statement of reduction in load shedding and bringing down the duration to seven to eight hours, but citizens of Lahore faced outages of more than 12 hours in urban areas and more than 15 hours in the city’s rural areas.
Officials of the Pakistan Electric Power Company (PEPCO) deceived the people by giving load shedding plan of closing electricity for an hour and restoring it for the next. “PEPCO devised the plan very intelligently and tried to kill two birds with one stone. There have been no protests in the city despite 12 hours of load shedding,” a source in PEPCO said. In Gujranwala, angry citizens staged a sit-in and vowed to continue protests until load shedding ended. The demonstrators blocked the Gujranwala-Sialkot Road with burning tyres and shouted slogans against the government’s apathy.
A complete shutter-down strike was observed in Sargodha and Attock to protest the power crisis. Markets in Faisalabad also remained closed for the day. People in Jhelum also threatened to block the GT Road for traffic if load shedding did not end.
