LAHORE: As Pakistan fell into darkness due to a power outage yesterday, a civil miscellaneous petition was filed in the Lahore High Court LHC on Tuesday, calling for stern action against individuals “jeopardizing the national security” of Pakistan.
Attorney Azhar Siddique submitted the petition and requested the court to give instructions for corrective measures to prevent similar power outages from happening in the future.
The All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) claimed in the appeal that the country’s textile industry suffered a loss of $70 million as a result of the power outage.
The statewide electrical outage left around 220 million people without access to drinking water as electricity-powered pumps became inoperable.In the midst of the bitter winter weather, power was down in schools, hospitals, workplaces, and stores.
He insisted that a statewide power outage had caused thousands of mobile phone towers to fall offline, creating the possibility of a communications blackout in some areas of the nation. He said that “the disruption damaged the country’s approximately 40,000 telecommunication towers.”
The petition claimed that the power outage had a significant impact on Pakistan’s national security and that no explanations for why it happened had yet been provided.
The application highlighted the price increase and power outages and claimed that “the people of Pakistan are suffering at the hands of the current leadership, which has miserably failed to cater to the economy.”
It said, “The federal government and others have failed to uphold their commitments.”
In order to “remedy the problem swiftly” and put in place a tight mechanism to prevent such a power breakdown that jeopardises the security of the country, attorney Siddique asked the court to issue directives to the federal government and other pertinent authorities.