Lyari PTCL officials indifferent to public woes

KARACHI - Hundreds of landline telephone connections remain disconnected in Lyari Town since long owing to the negligence and poor services on part of the PTCL Lyari Exchange, TheNation has reliably learnt. On the other hand, a source in the PTCL informed that the PTCL Lyari Exchange is unable to start the underground operation to restore the telephone connections, while no proper initiative has so far taken place by the high-ups of the PTCL. The source added that despite giving assurance to reconnect the dead lines, the PTCL authorities are doing nothing in that regard. Some angry consumers of the Lyari Town said due to the negligence of the Lyari Exchange officials, the consumers are preferring to using mobile phones instead of landlines and giving up their landline connections. The depressed customers who have been visiting the Lyari PTCL exchange repeatedly complained of disconnection of their telephone connections, said that their telephone lines remained dead for the last several months, and they launched their complains to the Exchange officials but their complains have not been considered. Besides, a number of consumers have permanently pulled out their PTCL landlines and started using mobile phones in their houses, as they are fed up of complaining to the PTCL exchange day by day. Alleging the Lyari Exchange management, the miserable PTCL consumers also said that the linemen in the exchange did not follow their complaints. Hundreds of landlines remained disconnected in Union Council Chakiwara alone, wherein the consumers have been suffering due to such poor behaviour of the exchange officials. Some Lyari Town exchange lower ranked employees requesting anonymity told that the Lyari town exchange had been suffering step-motherly behaviour by the PTCL authorities, adding the exchange has been facing lack of technical staffs, and there was a very small number of local employees in the towns exchange, as mostly the staffers living far away from the Lyari, who used to get late to the office caused poor performance of the exchange. Besides poor performance of the exchange officials, the lack of technical staff and shortage of modern equipment were also a reason of the poor services of the exchange they said. On the other hand, divisional engineer PTCL Lyari exchange, Abdul Jabbar Sheikh told that there was a fault in the underground Lyari exchange and it needed much time to be restored. Sheikh added that the underground works to resume the dead telephone connections had stated and very soon the disconnected lines would be restored. Replying to a query about the underground faults, he said that due to lack of communications between the civil departments such incidents mismanagement took place. He added that during the digging by the city government or any other department, the landline remained dead and the consumers suffered a lot.