Living in the kingdom of WAPDA

CHIRAL, July 16: In Chitral, WAPDA has made the lives of the citizens miserable and strangely one lowly official running the department as a king has become an incorrigible don. Though there is no city or town in whole Pakistan where people are not cursing the department for making their days and nights miserable in the sweltering heat and the holy month of Ramazan, in Chitral one official named Ghulam Rashid has not only failed to provide electricity to the consumers but also been humiliating them on one pretext or the other for years. Who is backing this man anyway? He has been serving in Chitral for whole of his career and his highhandedness was even taken up in Senate of Pakistan followed by his transfer out of Chitral a few yeas back. When the people of Chitral had taken a sigh of relief in the hope that WAPDA would now be able to run its affairs in the interest of the people with a new man in the saddle, Ghulam Rashid manipulated his transfer and landed back in Chitral. Last year, Ghulam Rashid and his coteries were also put behind bars but even then they did not mend their ways of mistreating the consumers. It is a common complaint of the Chitralis that WAPDA never gives them even a metre of wire when they need it and at times when a transformer develops faults Ghulam Rashid and his men take it once in a lifetime opportunity not only to tease the affected people but also to fill their own pockets by asking the consumers to collect donations for the installation of a new transformer. In any part of the country, when a transformer gets out of order it is the job of the government to replace it. But in Ghulam Rashid’s domain, such rules are never followed. People of Chitral always wonder where the millions of rupees given to the local WAPDA office for maintenance and other expenses go and is there any accountability of the amount. Strangely, government officials and political representatives never take notice of the public complaints or initiate action against the WAPDA officials for their highhandedness. It is perhaps because of the fact that Ghulam Rashid and co. also know very well how to keep those at the helm of affairs happy so that they would never have any need to punish him. People of Chitral have once again demanded that the official should be transferred out of Chitral and the affairs of the local WAPDA office should be streamlined to end the power-related miseries of the residents.–K.A. Jamil]]>