Electricity "the Consumers"

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
1

Electricity Consumers like this, no wonder power companies in Pakistan doesnt have enough money to spend on projects. this is one of it kind of a crime I have seen along with other in Pakistan.

srouce: Jang Multimedia

like UK, in most countries , normal theft has less punishment than stealing utilities, this is open robbery, dont know where are the authorities??? and this is on top of people bribing the line men to get meter reversed regularly to get less bills.

wonder how power companies cover this? they charge on stepped approach.. so what they do select few consumers charge them more units for a month, so even they correct the difference next months bill, they only refund the units not the actual paid by the consumers who had paid higher tariff for last higher band units.

2

Scarcity, Shortage and poverty is a curse that breads every other ill in the society.

Do not get mad at Pakistan only. Electricity-theft is pretty common among all the poor countries including India, BDesh etc. etc.

This is not to justify theft, but to point out that scarcity of electricity and unpredictable supply are the biggest causes of theft.

Pakistan like many other countries in the region also suffers from mass reaction to Government controlled monopoly.

For the longest time, government supplied electricity, and every one including WAPDA officials to the ordinary consumer treated electricity like mai-baap ka maal. And that's very true for India and BDesh too.

As the government operated a loss-making industry, the system degraded and funds were never available to expand the system to the desired level, and ABOVE all install new power stations to keep up with the population explosion and industrial expansion.

Not only that the funds were not available due to government controlled monopoly, the nation itself shot in the foot by pursuing anti-development preferences.

Our preference and penchant for so-called "Islamic bum + nuckie toy", and our ethno-fascistic attitude towards Thar and Kalabagh, and we have recipe for an utter disaster in the power supply system.

Sure we should try to limit the theft. There is no doubt in it. Even if we bring theft to zero%, we are still short of roughly 10,000 MW. Remember we need that much EXTRA electricity in the short run to avoid starving our farms and factories from badly needed power.

And how are we going to get it is a $billion question.

3

What do you mean consumer treated electricity like "mai-baap ka maal"? May be you mean 'power thieves' treated it like "mai-baap ka maal"? Lets keep a distinction between the two.

How did "islamic bum" come into the picture? Did "Islamic bum" divert money from our great-grand-plan of power projects which would've given us 10GW power?

Power theft alongwith govt not paying IPPs their bills is costing us the power. If we can eliminate these two hurdles IPPs will be able to pump up their power production and load-shedding will be minimal, atleast we won't have 10-12 hours of no-power.

4

Yes. Perhaps one should make a distinction.

Remember mai-baap-ka maal means "subsidies" AND "theft". A government owned utility was never meant to make profit, and thus continued selling power at much lower rates for many years. Finally when government support collapsed, and rates had to go high, the consumers balked.

Thus it was a double whammy of "subsidies" and "theft" that killed the golden goose of electricity supply companies.

Why do you ignore the main theme of Islamic bum + our ethno-fascistic attitude towards Thar and Kalabagh.

Thus it is our national attitude that is responsible for the lack of expansion in "affordable" hydro and nuclear electric generation.

Here is a bit more detail.

As a result of islamic bum, two things happened.

  1. We lost all the cash reserves. Remember Nawaz Sharif running post to pillar trying to stop the run on Pakistani reserves. But he couldn't. Then the sanctions came and we never recovered from it.

  2. Now that we don't have cash, we couldn't buy nuclear plants.

  3. The bum made us lose the loan options as well.

Second point

Ethno-fascism towrads KBD and Thar means we can't have cheaper electricity to balance off the high cost on oil based IPP.

Thus as a nation we have put ourselves in a straight jacket, and refuse to come out of it.

This is true but very very short term solution, and it is not sustainable over the long haul.

5

Pakistani fetish with Islamic bum + fanaticism and the resulting drain on our economy can be easily summed up by an old Bollywood song.

Bum maaro Bum, Mit Jai ghum
gas aur bijli ho gae kum

Bolo subah shaam,
Islam, Islam, Islam, Islam.

bum maro bum, Mit jai ghum

Timepass - November 2012
6

Re: Electricity "the Consumers"

dont de rail the thread with non related issues. these can be discussed on several existing threads on this forum.

there cant be justification for theft of this kind, and load shedding cant be one, people just taking liberties and pushing and exploiting the system. the only reason can be poverty and/or thug culture.

7

No derailing. If you feel that "Theft" is the silver bullet, then go ahead and suggest a solution.

Shortage of electricity is 10,000 MW, and tell us that best estimate you have to reduce this shortage by controlling the theft?