Most parts of Lahore and its adjoining districts continue to face electricity load shedding for hours besides forced outages and tripping. Facing high demand of electricity amid hot weather, the Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO) has resorted to carrying out load shedding even more than what the utility had announced a few days back. The LESCO had announced up to seven hours of load shedding in the latest load management programme issued for the period from Jun 25 to July 05, 2021. The situation is worse in rural areas where the consumers are facing 16 to 18 hours of load shedding, in addition to forced shutdowns being observed by LESCO in peak hours owing to overloading of the system. “Load shedding, tripping and power fluctuation have become a nuisance as these are not only affecting our routine activities but damaging the home appliances as well,” said a consumer. “We want the government to take notice of the situation,” he added. According to sources, outages in the LESCO area frequent since a centralised system run by the National Power Control Center (NPCC) has been directly shutting down the power supply, as rising shortfall threatens to knockdown the national grid.