Islamabad, March 25 (IANS) Long spells of power outage have caused huge public outrage in Pakistan's Punjab province.
On Saturday, the outages triggered protests in several cities of the province as power shortfall for the common man touched a staggering 70 percent, the Dawn reported Sunday.
According to officials of the Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco), urban feeders in the country saw about 16 hours of loadshedding, with each outage lasting four to five hours. The rural feeders saw a loadshedding of about 20 hours.
"If the load for the VVIPs, hospitals, defence establishments and industrial units, which exceeds 2,000 MW, is taken out of the equation, there is virtually no electricity in the country," an official said.
With total power generation going below 7,500MW even during peak hours, the company was facing a deficit of about 7,000 MW by Saturday evening.
If the load for the VVIPs and industrial units, etc, was deducted, the country had less than 5,000 MW against a total computed demand of 14,500 MW.
In Lahore, traders Saturday staged two demonstrations against the outages -- one on The Mall and the other in Urdu Bazaar.
They raised slogans against the authorities and burnt tyres to express their anger over the prevailing electricity situation.
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