LAHORE: The Lahore Electric Supply Company (Lesco) has also identified 100 high-losses feeders and decided to increase loadshedding if losses don`t come down, says State Minister for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali.

Talking to the media after his review of the Lesco performance on Tuesday, he said the list of these feeders would be released to the media, which the company did by the evening, and loadshedding to these areas could go up to 16 hours.The rest would face six to eight hours outages.

Flanked by Special Assistant to Prime Minister Dr Musadik Malik, he said the government would implement the same policy for consumers living in high line losses areas in all provinces and there would be no discrimination to the effect.

`We have a strategy to punish people as well as staff of distribution companies involved in theft and several officials of Lesco, including line superintendent and meter readers, are being chargesheeted for their alleged involvement in power theft,` he claimed.

The distribution companies including Lesco were being given shortand long-term targets to contain losses, he said and added: `We want improvement in recoveries. I will visit Lesco within a fortnight toreview progress.

Dispelling the general impression that he has taken on the KhyberPakhtunkhawa because of the PTI government, he said punishing highlosses areas was national and not province-specific policy. `People in KP would be punished as much as in Punjab,` the minister said.

Speaking on the occasion, Musadik Malik claimed to have completed homework on the second phase of power strategy with a view to eliminating large-scale power theft in the country. `It envisages a centralised system of real-time power supply and consumption data that would help identify losses and control them effectively.

Talking about Lesco, Malik said, problem of underand over-billing was being probed. `Theft incidences primarily occur among domes-tic, commercial and small-scale industrial consumers.

According to initial estimates, he said, around Rs20 billion to Rs25 billion worth of power was being stolen in the Lesco jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, addressing a meeting of All Pakistan Wapda Hydro Electric Workers Union (CBA) at Lesco headquarters, Abid Sher Ali sought cooperation of workers to overcome the menace of electricity pilferage.

He also urged the workers to help the authority recover lawful dues from defaulters.

The minister said the workers should ensure provision of better services to electricity consumers.

He directed the management to take all possible measures to prevent accidents of the electricity line staff by providing them with adequate safety equipment and ensur-ing observance of safety regulations at workplace.

Accepting the demand of the CBA Union for grant of one-month basic pay as honoraria to all employees of Lesco, the minister asked them to work hard to overcome the menace of power theft.

Earlier, veteran trade union leader Khurshid Ahmad demanded that the government focus on construction of new hydel power stations and new dams to provide cheaper sources of electricity.

He urged the minister to direct the management to ensure provision of security to the field staff and make wages commensurate with price hike.

He also asked the government to have second thoughts about privatising national public utility as it would do more harm than good.