KARACHI
Abdul Khaliq Mirza has the job you could die for.
He leads a team of bill collectors for K-Electric Ltd., the power distributor in Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi.
A typical day on the job can include threats of violence and then the real thing, including being shot at and dealing with angry mobs throwing home-made grenades.
It gets really rough in Orangi, an area once a stronghold of the Taliban, he said.
“We risk our lives every time we venture into the streets,” Mirza said in an interview in Karachi. “I’m from Orangi and am known in the area, so wherever I’m faced with a challenge, my connections always help.”
The risk comes with a payoff. Cash recovered is split with the company, with the bill collectors getting 20 per cent, K-Electric said in a statement. The more they recover, the bigger the pot.
More broadly, Mirza, 48, and others like him have helped K-Electric write a turnaround story.
The company became profitable in 2012 as bill collections jumped from 40 per cent when it was first privatised in 2005 to 70 per cent currently. Now, K-Electric’s controlling shareholder, is planning to sell its stake.
“We want to complete the success story,” said Tabish Gauhar, K-Electric’s chairman.
K-Electric, which was established in 1913 and nationalised in 1952, distributes electricity in a city of more than 20 million people. In 2005, 71 per cent of the company was sold to an overseas consortium by the government.
Electricity outages are common in Pakistan, offering opportunity for power companies that can fill the gap. Though they’ll need the services of men like Mirza, who dresses in the traditional shalwar kameez, locally made Sindhi cap, and displays the quiet authority of a schoolteacher.
The government kicked off an anti-crime drive in Karachi in September 2013, which Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said last week has reduced the rate of kidnappings and killings. Still, on March 20, several people were hurt in an explosion outside a Karachi mosque, while two soldiers were killed in a bomb attack in the city the next day, local media reported.
“If there is a protest we try to negotiate with the protesters and if they get aggressive we use baton, water cannon and even tear gas,” Atiq Shaikh, a spokesman for the Karachi police, said in a phone interview in response to questions about bill collectors.
Mirza says:“We get threats from everybody,” he said, recalling his face-off with a Taliban supporter in November. A marble crushing factory in Orangi was running on stolen power.
Mirza and his team of about 25 men reached the spot and found unauthorised cables running from a K-Electric transformer across the street to a walled compound, where the crushing machines were located. They shut off power to the area so they could cut the illegal cables.
