Karachi Blackout Protest Chox City Traffic: Punjab Colony residents blocked the roads after 24 -hour outage; Report systemic collapse

A protests on a long electrical outage in Karachi’s Punjab Colony on Saturday spared city-wide traffic anarchy, underlining, underlining the old governance failure and energy mismanagement in Pakistan, Dawn said.Residents of an 80-flat, the 10-storey building blocked a major road near Punjab Chowrangi after going for more than 24 hours without electricity. Power was allegedly out of 11 am on Friday, and despite repeated complaints, K-Electric, Karachi’s only power distributor, allegedly failed to respond.Capital traffic in resulting sit-in defense road and surrounding areas. Long queues of important trucks and tankers for Karachi port stopped from Qayyumabad to KPT flyover. According to Dawn, major intersections such as boat basins, gizri and Hino Choverbrangi were brought to a stay, causing thousands of passengers stranded.Outage allegedly followed the anti-tft operation of K-Electric in the nearby P&T Colony. The protesters claimed that legal connections were also disconnected in the sweep, which had no clear procedure. However, KE described the protesters as “miscreants” and attempted to restore illegal connections and stated that their teams were attacked during the operation, allegedly connected to a cable TV network. No evidence was given to all the affected residents in the theft.While K. claimed to have later claimed to restore electricity in some parts of the area, the big issue remains unresolved. The incident throws light on the ongoing struggle to provide reliable electricity of Pakistan, which has increased by the old infrastructure and lacks accountability in power distribution.As dawn said, the crisis is less about a blackout and a reflection of systemic dysfunction is high, where citizens are brunt of institutional failure.