Power bills leave consumers in a quandary

Islamabad: Scores of residents of Rawalpindi are in a quandary on receiving electricity bills of out-going month, as they have just two days to clear the dues while many may have already nothing in their kitty to do so, as the current month is about to end.
The date of meter reading mentioned on the bills is March 10 while bills were issued on March 17 and these were dropped at consumers’ addresses on March 29 while March 31 is the last date, afterwards they will have to pay the penalty.
There is a question mark on why this inordinate
delay was witnessed in distribution of bills after these were issued on March 17. Whatever can be the reason (s), power consumers have been put in a difficult situation.
It was learnt that some of the consumers had not received the power bills yet while in some cases, bills were dropped at wrong addresses: one wonders, how they will go about payment of the bills, when they receive them.
“The power companies will have to lift the level of their services to bring some improvement in the crisis-ridden Wapda. But at the moment, we are faced with this situation of having just two days to pay dues,” some of the consumers said while talking to ‘The News’.
They believed that once the entire mechanism was privatised, its performance in reach respect would dramatically improve, as had happened in the case of PTCL: not only quality of service had improved, consumers always got from one to two weeks to pay telephone bills.
A senior IESCO official at the Operation Division, Satellite Town, when contacted on phone for his comments on the issue, played it down and said that the schedule was disturbed because of three holidays (Saturday and Sunday), including that of March 23.
“People have money that is why they use electricity, payment of a few thousands should not be a problem for them,” he casually remarked to establish as if no irregularity or laxity had been
committed by the company staffers.
He did not offer any reply when asked, was March 23 holiday a new phenomenon that hit Pakistan all of a sudden and why they did not chalk out their operations accordingly.