DLP Report
PESHAWAR
The Traders’ Association Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has threatened to launch a district-wide shutter-down strike and protest campaign against prolonged electricity load-shedding in Peshawar if the government failed to address the issue within the next few days.
In a statement, the association’s spokesperson, Shahzad Ahmed Siddiqui, criticised the Peshawar Electric Supply Company (Pesco), alleging that prolonged and unscheduled power outages had made life difficult for residents and severely affected commercial activity in the provincial capital.
He said the persistent outages during the ongoing hot weather had caused hardship for children, the elderly and hospital patients, while businesses were suffering substantial financial losses. He claimed that prolonged power cuts had disrupted trade, affected the supply of medicines and oxygen in healthcare facilities, deprived students of a conducive learning environment and damaged electrical equipment worth millions of rupees.
Mr Siddiqui alleged that KP, despite generating a significant share of the country’s electricity, continued to face excessive load-shedding.
He said the burden of line losses and electricity theft was being shifted onto honest consumers through prolonged power outages, while entire localities were subjected to unscheduled load-shedding in the name of maintenance.
The traders’ leader also alleged that some officials had failed to effectively curb electricity theft, leaving law-abiding consumers to bear the consequences.
He demanded uninterrupted electricity supply for the province and urged the authorities to stop passing the burden of line losses on to regular bill payers.
Warning of a protest movement, Mr Siddiqui said traders, along with residents, would stage a complete shutter-down strike across the district if the situation did not improve, adding that the responsibility for any resulting unrest would rest with the government and the Pesco administration.
