The federal government, through a combination of budgetary allocations and debt equity-swap under the Asian Development Bank's aid programme, has agreed to meet the cash shortfall between July this year and June 2003 in an apparent bid to save the KESC from going down under. Though this measure will provide some immediate relief in that it will keep the company running, it cannot help sustain the KESC over the longer term. The immediate need for the KESC is to effectively curtail its transmission and distribution losses, which amount to power literally being thrown out of the window, and more than 40 per cent of the KESC's total losses. Let the army monitoring teams make themselves useful, if indeed they can be of any help in reducing the extent of losses through theft and distribution faults. Also, let, for once, the consumers do their bit as well by restricting their use of electricity to essential purposes alone.
Prudent use can help shorten the painful and long spells of loadshedding.
Both the KESC and the consumers can start working on this concerted self-help programme immediately. This may mean investing in improving the existing infrastructure and tapping alternative sources of affordable power generation, such as thermal stations being converted to run on gas in place of furnace oil. The KESC has done that with its Bin Qasim plant and the results have been encouraging. With administrative expenses eating up most of their income, hardly five per cent is being spent on the betterment of the workers. Most of them lack access to medical care, and the quality of medicines at these institutions' dispensaries is poor.