Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) has asked the activists of defunct union to immediately return the dozens of repair vehicles that they have illegally and in an unauthorised manner hijacked for over two months.
At least 22 such vehicles are parked at the labour union camp near Governor House. This illegal possession of dozens of repair and maintenance vehicles is depriving 20 million power users of early repair of the piled up local faults.
The KESC has demanded immediate end to misuse of the said hijacked repair vehicles in order to deploy them for attending public complaints. The vehicles have been hijacked from various public complaint centres and repair and maintenance offices. KESC has also received numerous eyewitness accounts and substantial reports to believe that the defunct union activists have been misusing these and many other vehicles for creating man-made local faults in various localities and then extorting money from helpless consumers to fix these faults.
The utility urged upon the executive authorities and law enforcement agencies to vacate all the said 22 and other vehicles from the illegal possession of union activists and to provide relief to power consumers of Karachi, who have been facing great hardships caused by prolonged fault-based outages, violent fluctuation of voltage, and frequent interruptions.
Of the dozens of hijacked repair vehicles, about 22 MTLs are parked in the vicinity of defunct union rally, with numberplates covered with pieces of cloth. Two of these are JX-6552 and JX-6553. Union activists and miscreants have also been holding dozens of other repair vehicles for extorting money to fix self-made local faults.
KESC also called upon the society in general and media organisations in particular to take notice of anti-consumer misuse of these repair vehicles which should otherwise have been on the road attending customer complaints.
KESC said that media being the most sensitive part of the society needed to ask union activists under what law or trade union ethics could they illegally hijack the public service repair vehicles and misuse these for their own illegal purposes. While appreciating media role in highlighting unduly prolonged fault-based power outages, KESC urged the fourth pillar of State to also depict this side of the coin so as to reveal the actual cause behind piling up of public complaints.
VSS: KESC has strongly denied a news item aired on one channel claiming return to work of the non-core employees who did not accept final Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS). The utility said that the non-core functions have already been outsourced as per company's decision. Therefore, there was no question of these non-core employees returning to work.
WATER: While referring to complaint by Karachi Water Board, KESC said that power supply to Dhabeji Pumping Station was affected when Dhabeji grid station went offline due to 132kV conductor theft. However, the largest part of the Water Board complaint dealt with the illegal connections linked to water pumping feeders under the knowledge of the Board management which caused permanent over loading to the power supply network and resulted in frequent interruptions, KESC said and demanded of the Water Board authorities to permanently remove all illegal connections from the network designed to supply power to water pumping stations. KWSB should approach law enforcement agencies and Government authorities to remove illegal connections that are allegedly being supported by a local political figure.-PR
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