King Edward boys hostel power outages
Lahore: Around 12 hours of daily load shedding at the Hall Road wing of the King Edward Medical University (KEMU) boys' hostel has become a permanent "nuisance" for boarders, drastically affecting their performance, learnt on Monday.
The boarders criticised the government and the university administration for failing to ensure uninterrupted power supply, as is the case at the hostel's Link McLeod Road wing.
There are 100 rooms in the Hall Road wing of the hostel, housing 70 first year students and over 200 doctors.
The doctors demanded that the hostels was part of the teaching hospital and should be exempted from power outages, adding that load shedding was affecting their performance at
the hospital.
Performance: Dr Zaidaan Idrees Chaudhry said, "If one doesn't sleep at night, he cannot perform during the daytime at the hospital. The other hostel [McLeod Road] has an electricity connection from the Mayo Hospital, while the hostel for doctors has been left without a dual line or a generator. The whole routine has been disturbed due to long power outages."
Generator: He said in August last year, the hostel administration put up a notice saying it would provide a generator at the Hall Road wing to address the problem, however, no action has been taken so far.
"Students have no idea whether the administration is going to take any steps to provide any relief to them," Chaudhry added.
A first year student said load shedding was taking its toll on studies. He said the lack of an electricity generator or an alternative power supply system meant that the students had little facility for studying. "Exams are around the corner and we cannot concentrate on our studies, which is ultimately going to affect our result," he added.
KEMU Registrar Dr Mehmood Shaukat said that the administration had advertised a tender for acquiring a generator for the Hall Road wing and the process would be completed within a couple of days.
He said the generator would consume Rs 2.5 million worth of fuel per year, which the government had categorically refused to pay due to scarcity of resources.
Moreover, the administration also demanded uninterrupted power supply for all hostels, but the government provided power supply from the Mayo Hospital to only the McLeod Road wing, Shaukat said.
To another question, he said LESCO authorities had also refused to extend exemption from load shedding to all of KEMU hostels.
The registrar said the administration could only purchase the equipment and it was the government's responsibility to provide resources to run them.
However, Chief Minister's Task Force on Health Chairman Dr Saeed Elahi said the government has already raised the health budget, with Rs 2.20 billion allocated for providing air conditioners at hospitals across Punjab. He said the money was being spent in phases at various hospitals, with 87 generators to be installed at hospitals initially. Elahi said the government would ensure the provision of requisite funds to run the generator if the university purchased it. Daily times
