Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) have decided not to conduct raids in areas that were dominated by supporters of different political parties of violence-hit metropolis to avoid any untoward incident from taking place during campaign against electricity thieves.
Following the directives of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the KESC and FIA held a meeting on July 23 to stop incidents of power theft from happening. In the meeting, Additional Directors Asim Iftikhar and Javed Akbar Riaz represented FIA, while KESC team included Muhammad Taha, Osama Qureshi, Col (r) Wahid Asghar, Qazi Tameezuddin and Ahsan Anees.
A task force of FIA and KESC had been formed to conduct joint raids against people involved in the theft of electricity. It was also decided that the power utility would hand over a list of the defaulters of the power giant to the federal agency for recovery.
Well-placed sources in KESC told Pakistan Today that the power company and federal agency had decided not to conduct raids in politically dominated areas of the city. Earlier, the KESC and FIA discussed the situation of power theft in all parts of the city, and it was decided that raids would not be conducted in volatile parts of the metropolis.
In order to comply with the premier’s orders, the task force had been assigned to conduct raids only in small areas and on cottage industries which were located on the outskirts of the metropolis. It was also decided that the small industries located in Korangi, Surjani and North Karachi would be the main targets.
The KESC agreed because it had already formulated a policy to improve the recovery. In addition, the power company had hired political workers as Recovery Officers (ROs) to improve the revenue generation system. This can be proved from the fact that the power company showed a loss of Rs 15 billion in three months before, but current it had overcome the loss and was expected to make a profit of Rs 5 billion in September.
“Following the directives of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to stop electricity theft, the anti-electricity task force of the FIA along with the KESC regional teams would conduct joint raids against people involved in power theft,” KESC spokesman Ahmed Faraz said.
“These raids would be conducted across the entire city without any discrimination,” the spokesman clarified, while rejecting that, “These raids would not be stopped under any political pressure and would not have any political interference.”
“The KESC has in the past categorically rejected the wrong impression of any sort of political involvement by any element in the company,” he asserted.
“The power utility has established partnerships at only two of its Virtual Integrated Business Centers (VIBCs) with transparent operations,” Faraz maintained, while adding, “It is in line with its vision to continuously improve its service and bring down the load shedding hours in high loss areas and to monitor the system.”
“As far as average billing is concerned, KESC strongly rejects the wrong and biased impression that the purpose of installation of metres on PMT (Pole mounted transformers) is to send an average bill to the consumers,” he said, adding that, “KESC has clarified that the purpose of these metres is only to calculate the losses on the PMT’s and on the basis of compiled results, the feeder is set for load shedding hours.”
