LAHORE: The Punjab Assembly has unanimously adopted a resolution against unannounced load shedding, demanding that both the provincial and federal governments bring an immediate halt to unscheduled power cuts and ensure equal treatment of all consumers in the supply of electricity.
The resolution was moved out of turn by treasury member Ahsan Raza Khan and was carried by the House without opposition — a rare instance of the government and opposition benches converging on a single grievance.
According to the text of the resolution, load shedding in Punjab has become severe. It states that while the general public is bearing the brunt of prolonged outages, a particular class of consumers enjoys exemption from load shedding altogether — a disparity over which, the resolution says, the people of Punjab are deeply concerned.
Speaking in the House, Ahsan Raza Khan said unannounced outages were badly damaging livelihoods and small enterprises. “If load shedding is unavoidable, then a proper schedule should be issued, and load shedding should be the same for everyone,” he told the Assembly.
The resolution formally calls on the Punjab government and the federal government to stop unannounced load shedding immediately and to guarantee parity among consumers in electricity provision.
The intervention lands at a moment of acute public frustration in the provincial capital, where consumers under the Lahore Electric Supply Company have reported outages ranging from 30 minutes to six hours, alongside a rise in unscheduled tripping and transformer failures during a spell of heat and high humidity.
Constitutionally, electricity generation, transmission and distribution fall largely within the federal domain. Distribution companies such as LESCO, GEPCO, FESCO and MEPCO operate under the Power Division, while tariffs are determined by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority. Provincial assemblies therefore have limited direct authority over load-management decisions, and resolutions of this kind are recommendatory rather than binding.
Their political weight, however, is not negligible. A unanimous resolution from the largest provincial legislature in the country places formal, on-the-record pressure on the federal energy managers and creates a documented parliamentary demand that can be cited in subsequent proceedings, committee hearings and correspondence with the Power Division.
The complaint of unequal application is a long-standing one. Distribution companies apply differentiated outage durations based on aggregate technical and commercial losses recorded on individual feeders, meaning that areas with high theft and low recovery face significantly longer cuts than areas with strong billing performance. Critics of the policy argue that it collectively penalises paying consumers who happen to live on a poorly performing feeder, while defenders maintain that it is one of the few levers available to contain losses that ultimately feed into circular debt.
The resolution’s reference to an exempt “class” also echoes a recurring public debate over whether certain installations, localities and consumer categories are shielded from outages that are applied elsewhere without notice.
The demand for a published schedule is, in practical terms, the most actionable element of the resolution. Households and small businesses have consistently argued that predictability — knowing when power will be available — matters nearly as much as the total number of hours supplied, since it allows work, study and commerce to be planned around the shortfall rather than repeatedly interrupted by it.
Leave a Reply