Though the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) claims to have laid new underground cables of 11KV at a cost of Rs 1 billion, the new installation is yet to provide benefit to the Karachiites who are still facing hours-long loadshedding due to, what the Company repetitively says, cable faults.
Besides the electricity shortages, the ever-present cable faults, which cause prolonged power outages in different areas of the city, have marked questions over the use of at least 0.9 million metres new cable which were imported from China during 2008 and 2009, sources told Business Recorder on Friday.
They said that the new management has claimed replacing the defective, old and rotted cables, which had been installed for the last 20 to 30 years, with the investment of at least one billion rupees. But, they said, no improvement has been observed practically as the company had failed to not only control the faults but its number was increasing with every passing day.
Interestingly, sources said, there were no old cable in the stores of KESC to prove that the new cables have been installed, replacing the rotted one. However, sources in KESC claimed that due to the infrastructure developed recently and construction of different buildings, it was hard to uproot the old cables.
The company has currently over 2.2 million metres underground cables with at least 1100 feeders with the distance of 2 to 3 kilometers each. During the current torrential monsoon rain, sources said, almost 40 percent of 11 KV circuits had tripped, leaving many areas of the city in dark for two to five days. Beside the underground cables, as sources said, the company had also imported other cables like Arial Bundle Cables (ABC) at a cost of around Rs 60 million to replace the existing Bare Copper Conductors (BCC).
The replacement of cables was made to discourage power thefts but due to the involvement of its own staff no improvement could be made by the company to reduce the power thefts of over 24 percent, amounting to Rs 24 billion per year. According to sources, in October 2007 KESC had purchased the ABC from France to discourage power thefts.
The French-made cables were installed in different areas of the metropolis, like Awan Colony No 1 and 2, Christian Colony, Bangali Para, Orangi Town etc. But, they said, the strategy of installing new cables in these areas failed as the people use alternative measures for power thefts like getting multiple connections from the point where a regular customer was linked through a wire.
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