Senate body asks to supply power to ‘stone-age’ village

ISLAMABAD: The Senate Standing Committee on Water and Power on Tuesday asked for allocation of funds for supply of electricity to Jand Tehsil’s Dhoke Raura, where people live in the stone age without power and gas services.
The committee met under its Chairman Senator Iqbal Zafar Jhagra. It had five public petitions listed on the agenda and it included Fazal Elahi’s petition too, besides other big issues like functioning and administration of Fesco and the plan to exploit Thar coal for power generation.
The committee chairman and its members, including PPP’s Taj Haider and Ahmad Hasan and PML-N’s Nisar Muhammad fully supported the petitioner and recommended that power must be supplied to Dhoke Raura as a part of village electrification scheme. The dhoke is close to Bhandar village, which was provided electricity many years ago. The dhoke falls in the NA-58 constituency from where Malik Aitebar Khan was elected an MNA in 2013 elections.
An Iesco representative said that they had no funds for such schemes, but the government or a federal or provincial minister could help do the needful. Apparently, the predicament of his and the people of his locality in the dhoke is hardly of any interest to influential figures. Therefore, his bid is most likely to meet disappointment. The estimated cost of power supply to the dhoke according to Iesco is Rs1.1 million.
Fazal Elahi, a retired railway employee, has seen 69 years of his life and is desperate to see his family members, including his grandson and a grand daughter to live under tubelight and enjoy some other electricity-related facilities.
He learnt from someone that the Senate had started taking petitions and referring them to the concerned standing committees for redressal of issues. He managed to email a petition some weeks back with the help of a youth from the Jand city.
“I count each day in the hope of provision of electricity to our locality, which is on the edge of the city and just 1,200-feet away from a village, where this service was provided long ago. But since we are voiceless and may be not politicallyimportant that much for politicians, we continue to be ignored,” he lamented while talking to The News.
Fazal Elahi has visited the Parliament House twice recently and was delighted to see its glittering corridors. But his daughter-in-law sends her five-year son to a school with un-pressed uniform on.
He either has to purchase ice during extreme summer days to cool drinking water or go to another village, where some people have fridges to get ice from them. But he does not visit them frequently, as it always appears odd to him and his family. There are eight houses in the dhoke and this locality hence consists of around 50 people. “We are virtually cut-off from the rest of the world because of non-availability of electricity in this era of modern technologies,” he lamented.
Fazal Elahi represents the people of his dhoke, being able to read and write in Urdu. He feels jittery on even feeling that his (petition) initiative might ultimately not bear fruit for them.
Jand is a tehsil of District Attock, from where the OGDCL has been drilling oil and gas for the last over three decades.