While the entire country, from Khyber to Karachi, is crying owing to severe power crisis, Bahria Town, Rawalpindi, is the only privileged private housing scheme, which has been given exemption from load-shedding. According to the load-shedding schedules being implemented with full force, the citizens of Islamabad are facing a four-hour announced load-shedding, whereas Rawalpindi is experiencing an 8-hour announced load-shedding, besides numerous unannounced outages.
In Islamabad, Red Zone comprising President House, Prime Minister House, Secretariat and diplomatic enclave are exempted from load-shedding due to security reasons. It is surprising that on one hand the people of far-flung areas are tasting load shedding up to 18 hours daily, but on the other an area (Bahria Town) which must be treated as at par with Rawalpindi zone, is enjoying 24-hour uninterrupted electricity whereas the adjacent towns and housing schemes are faced outages up to 8 hours, commented one citizen of Islamabad, Zafar Iqbal.
"It is unfair that the citizens of Islamabad and Rawalpindi are facing prolong unannounced load shedding," he added. Islamabad-based steel furnaces have already announced to lay off all its labour because of non-availability of power. Bahria Town has established its own grid station to supply power to its residents on a 24-hour basis, but it gets supply from the system of Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco). Spokesmen for Pepco and Bahria Town could not be reached for their comments.
An official source told Business Recorder that the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is also investigating tax leakage in private housing schemes/ societies, which procure electricity in bulk from public sector generation companies and supply to their consumers on self billing collection basis. An exercise is underway in the FRB to check the record of all the private housing schemes or societies to estimate the impact of tax leakage on revenue collection and future measures to stop this practice.
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