Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) has extended power facility to 5,013 villages across the country during the first nine months of the current year.
The work is apace to accomplish the target of providing power to a record 6,300 villages in a year for the first time in the history of Pakistan and the performance accounts for nearly 80 percent, exceeding the proportionate mark of the yearly target.
This was revealed at the Power Wing performance review conference here on Friday.
Wapda Chairman Tariq Hamid presided over the meeting. Members of the authority, general managers concerned, chief executives of Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco), corporate entities of the distribution companies, National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) and power generation companies (GENCOS) participated in the conference.
It was observed that the development activity matching the social service obligation was opening up new vistas of taking under developed rural areas at par with the developed urban areas to bring the rural population in the main stream, paving way to give boost to the agriculture sector for which Wapda has simultaneously provided 5,165 new tube-well connections during the first three quarters of the year.
The effort in nation building activities was bound to greatly contribute towards socio-economic uplift of the people of the rural areas, raise in standard of living of the rural population and thereby sharing in making the governments programme of alleviating poverty from Pakistan a success.
Speaking on the occasion, Wapda Chairman Tariq Hamid asked the DISCO chiefs to pay due attention to meet the set targets, as the financial year was nearing end.
He said that the performance in the paramount areas of village electrification, reduction in losses, revenue realisation, better services to the consumers, including proper and timely billing and other services should be improved.
He also said that prompt replacement of the age-old meters, which had outlived their life as well as defective meters would be taken care of in the interest of proper billing to the customers who were our patrons.
He also asked the DISCO heads to take all possible measures for protection of field staff to ensure that the employees were not subjected to excesses in performance of their official duties. He said that while reviving 20 percent quota of the posts in BPS 1-9 in all the categories of the employees' children, recruitment had been prioritised.
The first priority would be given to a child of an employee who died while performing official duty. Next would be employment to a child of an employee who became disabled, whereas third priority would be for a child of an employee who died or incapacitated due to some other reasons during service.
Thereafter a child of a deceased retired employee, a child of retired employee, a child of employee in service whose child has not been recruited before and employees who resigned after rendering 15 years or more service would be given jobs.
Member (Power) Muhammad Anwar Khalid said that funds for the partially electrified villages would also be adequately utilised to meet the targets set for the year in various areas of operations.
Anwar asked the DISCO chiefs that EROs should be properly implemented.
The meeting also noted that the energy losses in transmission, transformation at grids and distribution fields of operation in Wapda system had come down by 0.5 percent from 25.2 percent to 24.1 percent, whereas the auxiliary consumption at power houses inevitable to generate the energy not falls in the loss category.
In this regard, implementation of comprehensive programme for system upgradation, installation of capacitors, bifurcation of lengthy lines, etc, to further cut down the losses were fast moving forward.
As many as 3,050 schemes (117 HT and 2,933 LT) had been completed at a cost of Rs 1,169 million.
It was also noted that Rs 170.7 billion nine months billing to the consumers for FY 2003-04 was 10.2 percent above the billing in the corresponding period of the last year.
Similarly, the revenue collection in the period under review also registered 8.4 percent increase with the realisation of nearly Rs 156 billion against that of Rs 144 billion in the corresponding period of the last year.
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