Energy Minister exposes flawed working of his department

ISLAMABAD: Federal Energy Minister Awais Leghari on Wednesday concedes flawed working of the power sector in a session of the National Assembly’s standing committee for energy.

In a meeting of the energy committee chaired by Muhammad Idris, Awais Leghari disclosed that the department staff playing havoc with the system and writing lesser load in demand notices in connivance with interested persons, “which brings bigger load on the system”.

He alleged that the DISCOs and their staff have been the cause of most of the load shedding feeders across the country.

He said the Discos system has been overloaded and requires an investment of Rs 200 billion, adding that the distribution entities have been directed for comprehensive investment to resolve the infrastructure issues. “These 200 billion will be recovered from the power consumers within 25 years,” he further said.

Awais Leghari said that the distribution companies didn’t invest on the system.

He said that a plan has been devised for improvement of Discos on the instructions of the prime minister.

“There are 14,000 power feeders in the country and power theft has been reported at 3,000 feeders,” he said.

Minister said that the load-shedding is manifold of that level which has been allowed to the distribution companies.

“We will now shut the power from the transformer instead of the feeder, this will restrict the load-shading to the transformer level,” he added.