Mukhtar makes his mark

Within two days of taking over the Ministry of Water and Power, Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar has made his presence felt to the electricity consumers as well as the generation and distribution companies.
On Tuesday night and Wednesday, domestic consumers and industrialists in Islamabad and Punjab witnessed a marked improvement in electricity load shedding. The citizens were surprised to see that instead of power outages after every two hours, there were minimum power cuts on Tuesday night and during the day on Wednesday.
The improvement in power supply without prior announcement by the minister or PEPCO surprised the consumers and some of them interviewed by this news agency said that they wanted to know what “magic lamp” the water and power minister was using which increased the generation capacity.
While the supply position in Islamabad and Rawalpindi improved, there were no demonstrations against load shedding in other cities and towns. The sudden relief gave some satisfaction to the people who were perturbed over long hours of load shedding in scorching heat.
Some officials in the ministry said that Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar gave a strong message to the officers that he means business when he suspended the Managing Director of National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) on grounds of poor performance.
They said his meeting at WAPDA House in Lahore was also aimed at finding out the ills in the system. They said that being a businessman, Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar knows how to handle difficult situations and there would be no more pleasure days of employees of PEPCO and regional distribution companies.
However, some of the people interviewed by INP in markets said that the problem would remain as long as corrupt people particularly those involved in theft of electricity were taken to task. They pointed out that people having several air conditioners at their homes were paying a couple of thousands of bills while the bills of ordinary consumers were higher than those living in palatial houses.
They welcomed the pledge by Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar that a full-fledged campaign for the recovery of dues from the defaulters would start soon. Strict action would be taken against the electricity theft and defaulters, he held. They said if he succeeds in recovery of at least 90% of the dues, it would be his great achievement and rid the country of load shedding.