For those who live in Karachi, the daily grind is not just about navigating traffic, economic hardship, or extreme heat. It is also about surviving an energy regime that treats citizens not as people, but as data points on a billing sheet. The city, home to more than twenty million people, remains at the mercy of K-Electric—a company that has mastered the art of doing business without accountability. It continues to operate like an empire shielded from scrutiny, propped up by political silence and a legal vacuum. What is worse, it does so with impunity, as if the cries of an overheating city carry no weight in boardrooms or ministerial corridors. At its core, the K-Electric saga is not just about poor service or inconsistent power supply. It is a much deeper story about the hollowing out of public trust and the slow, grinding erosion of citizens’ dignity.
For over a decade, residents have complained of long hours of load-shedding, ballooning electricity bills, and inexplicable surcharges. All the while, K-Electric wraps itself in press releases and PowerPoint presentations, claiming technological advancement, grid investment, and customer service upgrades. Yet none of that translates into actual relief for the people who matter most—the working class, the elderly, and the students trying to study by candlelight, or the sick who depend on life-saving devices during heatwaves. If the situation feels familiar, that’s because it is. K-Electric’s monopolistic grip has been enabled and protected by successive political regimes, none of whom have found the moral clarity or political courage to loosen it. The PPP-led Sindh government has maintained an uneasy, and often complicit, silence.
This is a party that claims to champion the poor, yet cannot find the will to challenge a corporation that directly exploits those it claims to serve. The MQM and Jamaat-e-Islami, meanwhile, prefer to rally on the streets, deliver fiery speeches, and hold sit-ins—gestures that generate noise but very little structural change. There is no shortage of legal and administrative remedies to address the crisis. Citizens have a right to demand that the regulator—NEPRA—intervene to end unjustified load-shedding and excessive billing. There is legal precedent for offering humanitarian relief in utility payments, especially to those who have paid their bills religiously but now find themselves crushed by inflation and unemployment. The framework exists to argue for fixed billing for vulnerable communities, or for targeted subsidies based on income thresholds.
But such interventions require not just paperwork—they require political will. And that, sadly, is the one commodity Karachi has always been denied. Consider this: if just ten percent of the city’s residents were to file legal petitions against K-Electric’s practices—millions of grievances documented and presented in court—it would be impossible for the authorities to ignore. But to rally citizens into legal action, to organize communities around litigation rather than mere protest, demands a leadership that is both principled and brave. It demands a politics not of expediency, but of empathy. K-Electric’s public narrative, meanwhile, continues to rely on clever corporate spin. Its CEO, Moonis Alvi, recently made headlines by suggesting that load-shedding could end—if only the government helped recover losses from 300 feeders. He claims that 70% of K-Electric’s network is already exempt from load-shedding, and blames the remaining 30% on high technical losses.
These statements are framed as facts, but they are also a subtle shifting of blame. Instead of admitting structural failure or mismanagement, the burden is redirected—towards government inefficiency, non-paying customers, or theft. The human impact is erased. The mother trying to preserve food in a refrigerator that doesn’t work is not part of this equation. The factory worker who loses a day’s wage because the power cut halted production doesn’t appear in the PowerPoint slide. On the federal level, the signals are mixed. The government has submitted a tariff revision request to NEPRA, sparking fears that another silent bailout is on the horizon—one more subsidy to a private entity already thriving off public misery. However, Power Minister Awais Leghari recently broke ranks with tradition. He said what many have long suspected: that the power sector, public or private, can no longer carry the burden of inefficiency.
His words are welcome. But they will remain hollow unless they are followed by structural reforms—reforms that open the energy market to real competition, that dismantle monopolies, and that protect consumers instead of punishing them. Karachi’s plight is not unique in the global South. Across developing nations, utilities once seen as essential services have been corporatized and converted into instruments of extraction. But what sets Karachi apart is the scale of the city, the severity of its conditions, and the glaring lack of redress. Summers are becoming deadlier, incomes are shrinking, and basic services are vanishing. In such a scenario, uninterrupted electricity is not a luxury—it is a lifeline. Denying it is a violation of economic justice, of human rights, and of basic decency.
The reckoning with K-Electric will not come easily. But it must come. It begins with breaking the monopoly—not just in name, but in function. Let there be competition. Let other companies bid to provide power to Karachi, and let residents choose. If K-Electric is truly as competent and efficient as it claims, it will survive in an open market. If not, it will finally face the consequences of its chronic failure. Until that day comes, every blackout in Karachi is more than a technical glitch. It is a manifestation of political cowardice, of regulatory apathy, and of a corporate culture that thrives in the absence of scrutiny. It is a reminder that for millions in this city, darkness is not just a power failure—it is a betrayal.Bottom of Form
