Audit of every power distribution company ordered to map bijli chori

The federal government has ordered a technical audit of every electricity distribution company in the country to establish how much power is being stolen, where, and how much of the loss is technical rather than theft. The decision came through a prime ministerial directive and was taken by a committee co-chaired by Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Senator Ahad Cheema and Federal Minister for Power Sardar Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari.

"The government is fully focused on reducing electricity theft," Cheema said. "Under no circumstances will the burden of power theft or inefficiencies within the distribution system be shifted to the people. Overbilling is completely unacceptable."

What the audit covers

The audit is meant to produce the thing that has been missing from this argument for years: a measured figure for the actual scale, causes and geographical concentration of theft, separated from technical and commercial losses, DISCO by DISCO. The Power Division, NEPRA, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication and the Pakistan Digital Authority are all in the loop, which points at a data and metering exercise rather than a paper review.

Terms of reference are to be finalised within a week. An expression of interest for qualified technical experts follows shortly after.

Why this lands on your bill

Distribution losses and unrecovered bills do not vanish. They are recovered through tariff adjustments that every paying consumer sees, which is exactly what Cheema was addressing. It is also the reason this subject comes up at every IMF review, and an IMF mission opened talks in Karachi the same day.

The immediate practical point for a household is detection of overbilling, which is a separate problem from theft but shows up in the same place. Three checks take ten minutes:

1. Read the units on the bill, not the rupees. Compare the current month with the same month last year on the same bill, which every DISCO prints.
2. Work the units back through the slab rates. Our electricity bill calculator uses the current notified tariff, and the electricity units calculator tells you what each appliance should be drawing.
3. If the meter reading on the bill does not match the reading on the meter, that is a written complaint to your DISCO's customer services first, and then to NEPRA, which has its own complaint process.

If your bill jumped in summer rather than year round, the cause is usually cooling load rather than a faulty meter. Our AC running cost calculator shows what an inverter unit costs per hour at current rates.

The wider context

K-Electric, which is outside the DISCO structure and serves Karachi, is dealing with a cash squeeze of its own, with a tariff stuck near Rs 32 a unit. The audit announced on Wednesday covers the ex-WAPDA distribution companies rather than Karachi's supplier.