LAHORE: The people across the country are spending restless days and sleepless nights due to prolonged power outages amid scorching heatwave.
The power outages that have gripped the whole country for the past couple of weeks have increased manifold, causing immense distress to the people.
Despite the tall claims made by the incumbent government about bridging the gap between demand and supply of electricity, the loadshedding frequency has multiplied significantly and now citizens are being provided electricity only for an hour after break of half an hour during peak demand.
Urban areas are facing the same problem while villages are the worst-hit as they are being provided electricity just for 6-8 hours a day. Rasheeda Begum, a housewife, was visibly perturbed over what she called crippling outages in recent days. Owing to prolonged power outages, water supply also got affected, making life worse, she observed.
Riaz Ali, a resident of Canal Road, was of the view that he really faced a lot of problems while going to his work as he had to spend sleepless nights due to absence of power. Many citizens are facing extreme hardships as their home appliances have been non-functional owing to frequent power cuts. Besides adversely affecting homes, small businesses have been hit hard due to abrupt and long cuts in power supply.
The owners of small shops are facing many problems while tailors are confronting an uphill task in completing work at hand. Master Riaz, was much disturbed as his work was affected severely due to unending power suspensions. "I have never seen such a messy situation before," he observed.
Similar is the case with Adnan, another tailor who was feeling tired as he could not stitch cloths as per commitment because of the long outages. "Ultimately, I may end up facing heavy losses as I have employees on fixed pay-role, and they are still being paid and the work has not been done owing to persistent loadshedding."
Social media is also abuzz with resentment due to record power outages. Mazher Arshad, a cricket statistician, commented on micro logging website that he has seen horrible loadshedding in Lahore.
Arif Idris, another netizen, complained of 6-8 hours of electricity cuts in his area. Qamar Zaman, a resident of DHA-2, Islamabad, bemoaned that he was braving eight-hour loadshedding for the first time since the last four years. Adeel Raja said he faced a very hot day today without electricity as it was very difficult to ride bike to office after having no power at home for hours.