‘No area faces cuts for more than two hours in a day’

Arun Kanchan is the chief executive officer of Reliance-backed power distribution company BSES. In an interview with Avishek Dastidar, he claims the power cuts are ‘not for more than a couple of hours’ and BSES has supplied more power to Delhiites this year than last year.

Why is Delhi experiencing so many power cuts?

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Not many power cuts are happening. But yes, there is a crisis. Our power purchase agreement with Uttarakhand for 200 MW has been unstable. The hydel power generation in other hilly states like Himachal has been low for want of water. Overall, the generating units from where the Northern Grid gets power have been producing less electricity. It is a national crisis.

People from most areas that you service are complaining of 8-10-hour power cuts.

How can that be? It is absolutely false. No area is facing power cuts for more than two hours a day.

How can you say we are not supplying power when my data shows that for the month of June, we have supplied 13 per cent more power to our areas compared to June 2008?

Yes, there could be some breakdowns of local systems but the outages would never be so much. Please do not sensationalise the matter.

Consumers complain of arbitrary power cuts at unearthly hours. Why don't you release a schedule of cuts to consumers beforehand?

We are in fact preparing an outage schedule to distribute with our bills. We do put up the schedule on our website. And for the future, we have a database of mobile numbers of consumers to which we will send power cut updates. And I do not believe power cuts happen during unearthly hours because early in the morning the demand is usually low.

Getting through to your helplines is a matter of chance, and often people do not get any response at all. When one does get through, they do not have adequate and significant information. Your comments.

The (call centre) executives will not have the information on low-frequency outages. The volume of calls increases whenever an area faces power cuts. In order to manage, we increase the capacity of our helplines in summer. There might be some waiting period but not much.

What is the maximum duration of power cuts any area serviced by BSES has had to face in 24 hours, in the past seven days?

One hour for low-power-theft areas and two hours for theft-prone areas in 24 hours.