With no clear instructions, the Lahore Electric Supply Company officials and the general public are in a fix over Fuel Price Adjustment (FPA) issue. Some LESCO officials at customer care centres are facilitating customers by excluding FPA and issuing new bills while others are telling them that the amount cannot be deducted. Some traders have moved the court against the FPA and pleaded that it should be excluded from the current bills. The monthly FPA for the month of June was Rs 1.036 per unit and for July Rs 2.0429 per unit. Both the FPAs were added in October’s bill, doubling it for some.
LESCO sources said the company officials were not clear about FPA. “There is no clear instruction from the top management regarding FPA and every official is taking decision on his own,” the sources said adding this sort of thinking would create a lot of problems in the coming days.
They said if the decision of FPA came against LESCO then there will be problem for those who have deposited the bills and if the decision were to be in favour of LESCO then the consumers would be in hot waters. “If the order asks us to exclude FPA then the customers who have deposited the bills would have to wait for the amount to be returned,” said an official, adding “if it is levied, the bills for the coming months would be very high also”.
The sources claimed that there was no mechanism of bifurcating FPA-paid bills from FPA-unpaid bills and the consumers would have to make the effort on their own. Consumers have expressed utter shock at the mayhem that has been caused by a lack of clear policy guidelines. “My cousin living in Samanabad contacted LESCO office for excluding FPA from the current bill and his bill was corrected but when I contacted LESCO, I was told that there was no such facility,” said a domestic consumer Nabeel Khan at Township customer care centre.
