The most vicious post-poll power game

Forget other after-election tie-ups, Delhi seems to be married to electricity outages, HT Correspondent writes on how after polling for Lok Sabha elections over in Delhi, Dehiites have witnessed power cuts making a comeback.

Residents of many parts of the city had a harrowing weekend—facing outages for upto three hours. Parts of west, east and south Delhi faced power cuts as a result of reduction in power supply.

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Production of electricity was affected with two units of Gas Turbines not functioning. Units of Indraprastha Thermal Power plant were also out of order owing to unavailability of gas.

Owing to the shut down of power generation plants, there was reduction of 252 MW in the production of these plants. “In our area, power cuts lasted for more than 30 minutes thrice a day. Our daily chores were affected”, said Rathi Singh, a resident of Dwarka.

Areas such as Raja Garden,Rajouri Garden, Palam, Dwarka, Punjabi Bagh, Mayur Vihar, Laxmi Nagar, Krishna Nagar, Jamia Nagar, Lajpat Nagar, New Friends Colony also reported power cuts.

Water and power are two major issues that concern the Delhiites most and politicians had made several claims regarding providing adequate supply of both in their manifestos.

But the ground reality is completely different. “Before elections, the power scenario was fine but now that voting process is over power cuts are back. In East Delhi, we are facing regular power cuts lasting 2-3 hours everyday. Most offices and educational institutions are shut on Sunday and is the power scenario is this bad on weekends then what will happen on weekdays?” said VK Arora, a member of URJA (United Residents Joint Action).

According to the state load dispatch centre the peak load on Wednesday was 3,226 MW and the local generation was 999 MWs.
On Saturday the peak load was 3,401. According to the department most power generation plants would start functioning from Monday but some would be functional by the end of the month.