Power supply will improve soon: Chief Engineer
The Power Development Department (PDD) is resorting to over 20-hour power cuts in violation of the curtailment schedule of 4 and 8 hours which was earlier approved by the government for metered and unmetered areas respectively.
PDD is not sticking to any curtailment schedule and the electricity is supplied only for few hours during the day which has triggered widespread resentment among people with protests lodged at many places. Even as PDD had to notify the outages schedule, it has not done so leaving people peeved. Earlier this month government had approved a schedule of 4 and 8 hour power cuts in the metered and non-metered areas respectively, but it is now being violated with impunity.
Due to massive power cuts, the mainstream political parties have come down heavily on the government. Earlier, former Chief Minister and National Conference Working President, Omar Abdullah criticised the government’s curtailment schedule and took a dig at PDP stating that it will now distribute lanterns among people.
“Mehbooba launching the new Mufti Syed memorial light and heat scheme (to go with food scheme of the same name). One lantern per family,’’ Omar tweeted.
Other politicians including the CPI (M) leader, Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami also criticized the government for erratic power cuts. Due to heavy power cuts normal life has been thrown out of gear across Kashmir. In major hospitals of Kashmir including the district and sub-district hospitals patients and their attendants are facing a tough time as the authorities are not able to put on the heating gadgets due to power curtailment.
Adding to the problem of people is the outage they have to face in the wake of snags in power transmission and distribution infrastructure for failure of government to upgrade it.
The distribution set up is old and not able to support the load of the consumers who have been added due to increase in the population, said a senior official of Power Development department.
Meanwhile, Chief Engineer PDD, Shahnaz Goni said the power supply scenario will improve.
“Every year we have problems in winter and we prepare infrastructure upgradation plans in advance, which, however, couldn’t be done this time due to the unrest. Due to increase in number of power supply connections for the last two years the constraints on the system are higher. We had kept a plan of segregating the feeders and augment the system, but the works remained hit due to the unrest. But we are now working on this and the supply position will improve shortly.’’
