Restore Nurpur power office, govt urged

The commercial power consumers who had started getting the facility of load approval in Nurpur, Indora, Jawali and Fatehpur subdivisions after the opening of Electrical Circle office at Nurpur in September 2022 are a harried lot since the closure and denotification of the office in January last year.

The demand for restoration of the circle office has now started gaining momentum.

After the sudden closure of the office, the commercial electricity consumers are forced to travel to the Dalhousie circle office in Chamba district to get 3 Phase power connections approved.

Residents of the lower Kangra region alleged that the state government had taken the decision of closing a functional office in haste. Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu had sanctioned three circle offices of the Jal Shakti Department, Public Works Department and Himachal Pradesh State Electricity Ltd at Dehra after his wife Kamlesh Thakur won the Assembly byelection. People questioned the rationale behind closing a functional circle office in Nurpur and sanctioning three new offices in Dehra.

The Nurpur office was functioning from a building owned by the HPSEBL in the Chogan area and was inaugurated by the then local MLA and former Forest Minister Rakesh Pathania on September 29, 2022. While it was duly approved by the management of the HPSEBL, a notification was issued in July 2021 before its opening. The HPSEBL management had reportedly created 16 new posts to make the office functional. A superintendent engineer, one executive engineer (attached), one section officer, one office superintendent and one junior draftsman were posted in the office. The government had constituted a committee to review all de-notified institutions and recommend restoration of need-based offices, but the fate of the committee and its recommendations remained unknown.

Terming the decision to close the electrical circle office of Nurpur as unfair, former minister Rakesh Pathania has appealed to the Chief Minister to restore it in the larger public interest of the people of lower Kangra areas. “The HPSEBL had worked for several months to explore the need and viability of the office at Nurpur. Its closure by the Congress government is an anti-people decision,” he said.