Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited (SNGPL) General Manager Lahore Sohail Gulzar has said that One Window Customer Centre is under construction in the Lahore office that will start functioning by the end of this financial year. While talking to Business Recorder, Sohail said that One Window Customer Centre would save the time of the consumers, who would get all the information regarding new gas connection and billing under one roof.
Sohail said that domestic consumers were more involved in gas theft as compared to commercial consumers, adding that reason behind the increasing trend of gas theft among the domestic consumers was increasing dearness and rising inflation due to which they were unable to pay their bills, while another reason was that they had to wait for more than one year after the payment of their demand.
Sohail said they had disconnected the connections of many housing localities where houses were getting gas through by passes. He also said they had detected 5,000 connections who had installed fake metres out of which 1,600 were regularised and 450 were disconnected while action against remaining were under process, adding they had also disconnected 5,000 connections on the charges of gas theft.
Sohail said the Criminal Law Amendment Act 2011 helped us a lot in curbing the gas theft, as SNGPL had registered more than 40 FIR's against both the commercial and domestic consumers who were involved in gas theft.
SNGPL General Manager Lahore Sohail Gulzar told Business Recorder that "we cannot file a case against people of an entire area where gas theft is found. We only register FIR against few people mainly involved in theft. For instance, if our team finds a bypass from our main or secondary transmission line, then case is registered against the most concerned person," he said.
"We cannot register case against those who are not our consumers, only what we can do with such illegal connections is to disconnect them," he added. Sohail said that after the enforcement of the Criminal Act people preferred to pay the fine because majority of the people avoided police cases. When asked whether SNGPL went after any big gun, Sohail said the company often had to bear immense pressure but it tried its best to go by the law.