‘Unannounced’ protracted power outages irk residents

Shivani Bhakoo
Tribune News Service
Ludhiana, August 1
The monsoon rains are here and residents have heaved a sigh of relief after a hot summer. However, the sense of relief is interspersed with pestering humidity and now with an erratic power supply in many neighbourhoods of the city.
Residents of Basant Avenue, Dugri, have been suffering due to unscheduled power cuts for the past three-four days. Over the past two days, residents received power for just about eight hours.
Col DS Grewal, an area resident, said, “Inverter batteries run dry during such protracted power cuts, forcing residents to bear the humidity without fans. Their work also suffers for they are unable to charge their phones. There has been an outage since around 9 last night. It is 11 am now. We have been making rounds of the PSPCL offices and calling redressal centres but to no avail. They have switched off their numbers, leaving us in the lurch,” Col Grewal rued.
Another resident, Vijay Kumar, said the transformers in the area were not able to take the load due to the seasonal increase in demand. “But why should we be punished? It is the PSPCL’s duty to ensure we are given uninterrupted power supply! When we are paying the bills, it becomes the duty of the government to provide us with proper facilities. Unannounced long-duration power cuts come on the pretext of tripping of lines, maintenance work, etc. Departmental apathy is becoming intolerable,” Kumar rued.
The residents said that on one hand the Chief Minister claimed there was no dearth of power and that the government was selling it to other states, on the other, residents are being forced to press for an uninterrupted power supply. Residents rued that from Junior Engineers to the Chief Engineer, no one was willing to address the issue.