Punjab Inspector General (IG) of Prisons Mian Farooq Nazeer on Friday demanded load shedding exemption from PEPCO for all 32 jails in the province during the scorching summer.
IG Prisons said prisoners were not allowed to sleep in the open outside their barracks for security reasons.
He highlighted that generators installed at some of the jails failed to meet the ever increasing needs of electricity.
Nearly 48,897 prisoners are housed in 32 jails across the province, including women and juvenile prisoners against a sanctioned strength of only 21,527 persons.
IG Prisons regretted that all cells and barracks were over crowded with three times more people housed inside than the capacity.
In such a situation power outages in jail cells becomes suffocating for prisoners and their discipline maintenance becomes more challenging, he said.
“Although we have made elaborate arrangements to ensure provision of water coolers and cold filtered water for prisoners but these facilities are useless due to long duration of load shedding,” he added.
He reiterated his viewpoint that the managing director of PEPCO and chief executives of all distribution companies should exempt jails from load shedding on humanitarian grounds, adding that it can create law and order problem.
