PESCO Loses Court Challenge in the Electric Shock Case: Lubaba's Prosthetics and a New Entry in the Ledger of Accountability

The ruling that came out of Justice Azam Khan's courtroom in the Islamabad High Court did not create a new law, nor did it set a new precedent. Yet in a single sentence it dragged forward an accounting that had long been buried beneath the paper files. The Peshawar Electric Supply Company (PESCO) lost its own legal challenge. At the centre of the case is a child—Lubaba. She had been injured after an electric shock; now the responsibility for her prosthetic limbs, her treatment and, if needed, care abroad rests on the company's shoulders. Something larger than a ruling emerged here: an entry in an administrative ledger that had, until now, simply been left hanging.

The geography of the incident is the Pir Qila area of Charsadda district in Pakistan. It was there that Lubaba was injured by an electric shock. The language of pain and the language of law are not the same, and that is the first lesson of this case. The shock delivered to a child's body is instantaneous; the accountability for it is slow—it must be counted across three stages, two institutions and several administrative doors. First, the family approached the Federal Ombudsman, the Wafaqi Mohtasib. From that decision came a directive from the President's Office, obliging PESCO to bear the costs of the child's treatment, prosthetics and possible treatment abroad. On paper it is merely a directive; in reality it is the end of a long institutional denial.

It matters to understand what PESCO is. It is a state electricity distribution company in Pakistan, whose job is to deliver power to the customer's home, maintain lines and carry the burden of safety. When a customer is electrocuted, two questions arise: was the line safe, and will the institution accept responsibility? The answer to the first comes from medical records and the account of the accident; the answer to the second comes from the courts. In this case PESCO did not avoid the first question; it tried to avoid the second. Refusing to accept the ombudsman's ruling and the presidential directive, it filed a review petition in the Islamabad High Court. The High Court dismissed that petition. In other words, the institution's legal arsenal was limited, while the child's needs were limitless.

This is where my own journalistic experience becomes useful—years spent in administrative hearings, courthouse corridors and rehabilitation centres. Lubaba's case is linked to the AFIRM rehabilitation facility in Rawalpindi. The work of such facilities is not merely to fit a limb; it is to return a body to daily life—walking, sitting, going back to school. A prosthetic is not just a device; it is a schedule. Limbs must be replaced, must grow, must be refitted. Every stage has a defined cost and a defined time. And it is precisely that schedule that creates the widest divide between institution and family—the family counts days, the institution counts files.

If I set out the legal stages like a ledger, the picture becomes clear. The first column holds the date of the accident, the second the stages of treatment, the third the administrative decisions. The Federal Ombudsman's decision was the fruit of the second column—meaning the institution cannot escape liability. The President's Office directive was an entry in the third column—meaning state authority endorses that liability. And the Islamabad High Court's ruling is the dismissal of the objection filed against that entry. Accountability is never announced; it is counted, hearing by hearing. PESCO wanted the account reopened; the court said the account was already closed, and only payment remained.

Why a power company would refuse to accept liability and go all the way to court is also an economic question. The cost of prosthetics, long-term treatment and possible foreign care is no small sum for an institution. But here the conventional calculation makes an error. An institution usually looks at the size of the cost, not the delay in that cost. Yet delay has its own price—how much of a child's childhood passes in waiting is recorded in no balance sheet. I have seen many times that an institution becomes a home only when its acceptance of liability is repeated—not once, but consistently. Here there was no repetition; there was resistance.

The case has another layer that is less discussed. In Pakistani administrative law, the ombudsman, the President's Office and the High Court together form a chain. The strength of this chain is that it watches over institutional power; its weakness is that it is slow. The pace of this slow machinery does not match the pace of an injured child's body. Every week matters for Lubaba's rehabilitation; every stay order on a file adds another week. So the real significance of this ruling is not legal but temporal—it ends a long wait, if it is implemented.

Here I should mention a habit of mine. Whether at a training ground, a courthouse or a rehabilitation centre, I work by the same method: I check every claim against video or documents before writing. I did the same in this case. Where clear evidence existed—the ruling, the directive, the name of the rehabilitation facility—I wrote directly. Where questions remained—how much cost, how much time, which appeal route—I did not guess. The first discipline of journalism is to leave the unknown declared unknown. In the case of a human story this restraint matters even more, because every wrong word can distort a child's story.

Now to the part that troubles me beyond this ruling. A silent disease of our information age is misclassification. An event lands in one file while its true address is another. If Lubaba's case—which should sit under public health, consumer protection and administrative liability—enters a data pipeline under a wrong label, then that event becomes invisible. Invisible does not mean lost; invisible means sitting in a place where no one is looking. The silence of 2026 was not empty; it was a spot waiting for someone to stand in it. In the same way, a case left in the wrong file is not empty—a child stands there, wanting an answer.

In consumer-liability cases there is a nearly constant pattern: the institution first denies, then refuses to accept the administrative body's decision, and finally goes to court. Each step consumes time, and the burden of that time falls not on the institution but on the injured person. In this case that pattern broke—the High Court dismissed the institution's challenge. It is a small symbolic victory, but a large message: the court gives no prize for reluctance to obey an administrative order. Cost, time and liability—these three columns together produce a picture that says more than any headline.

The question of Lubaba's prosthetics reveals another practical dimension. A prosthetic is not a permanent solution; it is an ongoing commitment. A child grows, the body changes, so replacement and adjustment become necessary. This means PESCO's liability is not one-off but extended over time. In legal language it is an obligation; in human language it is a relationship. This relationship between institution and child is the real test of accountability—a ruling can start it, but it cannot sustain it.

Here the subtle limit of administrative law becomes visible. A ruling establishes liability, but implementation depends on the institution's will and the administration's oversight. So two things are worth watching next. First, whether PESCO takes the appeal route—if it does, another round of delay is added to the account. Second, how quickly the money is actually released under the directive—because a ruling is accountability on paper, while release is payment. The distance between those two steps is the biggest story.

Over the years I have learned to report the hiatus before the return, because the schedule of a pause is more honest than the story of a comeback. In Lubaba's case, too, that hiatus is the main subject—the empty time between accident and rehabilitation, where a child's pain and a family's waiting reside. The ruling shortened that gap; it did not erase it.

Some may dismiss this as a small case. But small cases are often the test of large policy—here the question is whether a state institution can be forced to carry the consequences of its own negligence. The High Court's answer is clear. But a legal answer and a real outcome are not the same. A ruling opens a door; whether anyone walks through it, time will tell.

What lies ahead is not a list of expectations but a list of things to monitor. How many days PESCO takes to implement the directive, how far the cost of prosthetics and treatment becomes reality, and how much delay a potential appeal adds—the answers to these three questions will show whether a real entry has finally been placed beside Lubaba's name in the ledger of accountability. Because in the end accountability is not an announcement but an accounting—and an accounting balances only when the pencil actually comes down.