LAHORE: Electricity supply has remained suspended since morning in Lahore’s Outfall Road, Nawab Street, Yousaf Road, Abdali Chowk Islampura and surrounding areas following a transformer fault, leaving residents without power for several hours.
According to residents, LESCO staff had not reached the site to repair the transformer even after several hours had passed, and power had not been restored despite repeated complaints.
The prolonged outage has left residents in severe distress, with children and the elderly among those facing difficulties.
Residents have demanded that senior officials take notice of the administrative failure and restore supply immediately by repairing the transformer.
Islampura, historically known as Krishan Nagar, is one of Lahore’s older inner-city settlements — densely built, narrow-laned and served in large part by distribution infrastructure that was laid to serve a much smaller connected load than the area now carries.
That mismatch is the structural background to complaints of this kind. Over decades, single-storey houses have been rebuilt as multi-storey units, small commercial premises have been added at ground level, and air-conditioning penetration has climbed, all while the local distribution transformer serving a lane or block may not have been correspondingly upgraded. Sustained overloading is a recognised cause of transformer failure, particularly during extended periods of high demand.
The Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO) is the distribution licensee for Lahore and its surrounding districts, operating under a licence issued by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA). Its obligations are not purely commercial: NEPRA’s performance standards for distribution companies set out expectations on restoration of supply, complaint handling and consumer service, and persistent failures can be raised with the regulator.
Consumers may register complaints through LESCO’s operational complaint centres and helpline, and may escalate unresolved matters to NEPRA’s complaint mechanism. NEPRA has, in past proceedings, taken up cases of prolonged unscheduled outages and inadequate maintenance by distribution companies.
The impact described by residents is not incidental. Extended loss of supply in a dense urban neighbourhood affects water availability, because many households in inner-city Lahore rely on electric pumps and overhead tanks. It affects the elderly and the chronically ill, including those dependent on refrigerated medication or powered medical equipment. It disrupts schooling and home-based work, and in commercial lanes it halts small businesses that operate on thin daily margins.
Distribution transformer failures ordinarily require either on-site repair or physical replacement of the unit, the latter demanding a crane or hoist and coordination on access — a genuine constraint in lanes of the width found in Islampura. Utilities also maintain stocks of replacement transformers whose availability determines restoration time.
None of that, residents argue, explains an absence of any repair crew at the site hours after the fault was reported. The Lahore Times sought LESCO’s position on the delay and on the expected restoration timeline; no official response had been received at the time of filing. The report will be updated when a response is provided.
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