A FEW months ago, I was appointed an independent director on the board of the Sukkur Electric Power Company (Sepco) by the federal minister for power. Having spent nearly two decades working with rural communities in upper Sindh, I saw this as an opportunity to confront a problem widely considered intractable: massscale electricity theft in villages.

The prevailing wisdom within the power utility is that rural communities cannot be persuaded to pay for electricity. Politicians behave as though electricity is theirs to distribute as political largesse. Voters, in turn, believe they have earned the right to free electricity by supporting those politicians.

What should be a straightforward transaction between a utility and its customer is instead an instrument of political patronage. The argument within the company and its political elements is that villagers can`t afford to pay for power. And rural communities consider free electricity a right, simply because that`s the only form of electricity they`ve experienced.

My recent experience suggests that the problem is not nearly as insoluble as we have been led to believe.

In my own village, where I have worked on integrated development for many years, we initiated an experiment to remove illegal electricity connections, known as kundas, and encourage households to apply for legal meters. Sepco staff removed about 500 illegal connections. The reaction was immediate. Nearly 200 villagers marched in protest to confront me. I invited them in to talk.

During the ensuing community meeting, I asked a simple question.

`How many of you have mobile phones?` Every hand went up.

`Have you ever gone to a mobile phone shop and demanded balance for your phone while refusing to pay for it?` The crowd burst into laughter.

`Why not?` I asked. `Because from the first day you used a mobile phone, you knew you had to pay for the service. But from the first day you received electricity, you never paid for it. So you believe that is normal too.

The exchange exposed something fundamental about electricity theft in rural Sindh. It is not simply a matter of poverty or unwillingness to pay. It is a culture of entitlement cultivated over decades, with the active participation of politicians and power company employees.But the villagers` resistance is not entirely irrational.

Many have legitimate fears about becoming legal consumers. Sepco has a history of imposing questionable detection bills. When consumers protest, corrupt officials demand bribes to withdraw or reduce those charges.

Why, villagers ask, should they voluntarily enter a system that exposes them to arbitrary billing, harassment and extortion? Some protesters made an especially revealing argument. My term on the Sepco board will end in three years, they pointed out. What happens after that? Who will protect them from detection bills, political interference and corrupt officials? It was a difficult question to answer because their mistrust is rooted in experience.Indeed, one of the greatest obstacles to legalising electricity connections comes from within Sepco itself. During our campaign, company employees actively discouraged villagers from applying for meters, warning them that legal connections would create endless headaches.

The reason is not difficult to understand. Illegal connections are a lucrative source of illicit income for employees who facilitate and maintain them. A legal meter threatens not only the culture of free electricity but also the informal economy that has developed around it.

This creates a remarkable situation in which the electricity company, supposedly responsible for selling electricity and collecting revenue, has employees with a financial interest in ensuring thatneitherhappens.

Simply telling villagers that electricity theft is illegal, or that they have a moral obligation to pay, achieves very little. Those arguments fall on deaf ears when the institution demanding payment has so thoroughly undermined its own credibility.

What does work is sustained engagement, backed by practical action and tangible benefits.Before our intervention, villagers typically received just three or four hours of electricity in 24 hours and experienced outages that could last months without repair. Following the removal of illegal connections and improvements to the distribution system, metered households began receiving approximately 16 hours of electricity daily. Any faults were repaired immediately.

This was a powerful demonstration of what legalisation could achieve. Instead of an unreliable supply obtained through illegal connections, households could now access substantially more electricity through a legitimate connection.

Of approximately 500 illegal connections covered in the initial exercise, around 100 households applied for meters. As those applications came in and the benefits became visible, others began expressing interest. We are now working to extend legal connections to more households and onto more villages.

The significance of this experience goes beyond the numbers. It challenges the entrenched assumption that villagers will never pay for electricity.

They can. But they need to see a credible alternative to the existing system.

That means reliable electricity, transparent billing, protection from arbitrary detection charges and a mechanism for resolving complaints without paying bribes. It also means confronting the employees and political interests that profit from the status quo.

Most importantly, it requires treating rural communities as participants in reform rather than merely as offenders to be punished.

Electricity theft in Sindh is not exclusively a consumer problem. It is equally a governance problem, sustained by a mutually beneficial arrangement between politicians, corrupt utility employees and consumers accustomed to receiving something for nothing.

Breaking that arrangement requires political courage, institutional accountability and patient community engagement.

Our experiment has not solved Sepco`s enormous problems. But it has demonstrated something important: the supposedly impossible is possible. This learning could be applied to the whole gamut of problems Sepco finds itself in.• The wnter is a rural development specialist and social entrepreneur.

naween.a.mangi@gmail.com