Updated on
Summary
President Asif Ali Zardari on the advice of the Prime Minister has instituted the Honour of Hilal-i-Eisaar. It will be conferred on various cities whose residents rendered services for accommodating and helping the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) of Swat and other affected areas in their homes and in camps. President also sought a report from Chairman WAPDA over the continued power outage from Mangla power house and sought an urgent report identifying the reasons and factors responsible. The President directed that the report should identify factors responsible, steps taken to rectify and measures taken to ensure that such breakdowns do not recur, spokesperson to the President former Senator Farhatullah Babar said. He said the President has taken a serious note over the persistent power shortage from the Mangla Power house and its non restoration thus far. He said the directive also called for indication of a time-frame within which the system will be fully restored, he said. The national grid suffered a massive shortfall of another over 1000 MW as Mangla Power developed serious technical faults, plunging to zero, the power generation. The fault occurred despite the fact that there was enough water for discharge and storage to generate the usual 1100 MW of power. The Mangla outage resulted in aggravating the power crisis as the shortfall in the national grid soared to 3650 MW. The President asked that his office be kept informed about the power situation and the steps being taken to improve it on a regular basis, the Spokesperson said.
