20 May,2011 07:07 AM IST | | Surender Sharma and Anurag Jadli
Several areas had no electricity for eight hours on Thursday. Authorities blamed it on a transformer glitch
East Delhi had to face the double whammy of high temperatures and high power demand on Thursday as residents sweated it out in the sweltering heat. The situation was made worse by power cuts in many areas.
'Fanfare': Family of Raheez-ud-din living in Mayur Vihar
experienced the 8-hour-long power cut on Thursday.
PIC/Imtiyaz Khan
Several parts, including Mayur Vihar bore the brunt as there was an eight-hour-long outage between 4 am and 12 noon in the area. Raheez-ud-din, a resident of Mayur Vihar, who also owns a shop in the area told MiD DAY: "There was no power in our locality since morning and because of this we don't even have water in our home because we have to run a motor to get water and the motor runs on electricity.
Because of this power failure our life is getting worse every day as we can't even sleep properly and our children are not able to reach school on time. When I complained to the distribution company BSES, they said that power would come back in an hour but we got relief only after twelve noon. Something really needs to be done because we can't live like this when temperatures reach 44 degree Celsius and beyond."
"Yes we had a power cut since morning. It all happened because of a technical problem. The lights had to be switched off and the repair took quite a long time. Some parts of the area had no electricity for 12 hours. We will try to ensure that this doesn't happen again in this area at least," Kailash Katyal, president of RWA Mayur Vihar said.
"At around 4.45 am there was a fault in a feeder placed in the transformer and our team immediately rushed to the spot at around 5.45 am to sort out the problem so that people wouldn't have to suffer. Our employees went back to the spot at around 8.30 am and disconnected power as part of a planned shutdown, so that they could repair the affected part of the transformer," said the official spokesperson of BSES.
Many residents raised the point that they had expected the Congress government to do more for them on the power front, what with east Delhi being the parliamentary constituency of Sandeep Dikshit, son of chief minister Sheila Dikshit. For instance, in the phase-II of Delhi Metro, Delhi-Noida and Delhi-Anand Vihar lines have both benefitted this area. Among others, Chungi Flyover, Delhi-Noida road link, Barapullah elevated road, Geeta Colony road were among the large number of projects done in the area with the credit on many occasions being attributed to Sandeep Dikshit.
In June 2010, Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee chief,u00a0 Jai Prakash Aggarwal had approached the Prime Minister's office alleging step-motherly treatment to his constituency, northeast Delhi, and alleged that the Metro line in his area was being dropped from Phase-III and the east Delhi parliament segment, represented by Sandeep Dikshit, has three functional Delhi Metro routes.
Lights out!
The national capital continued to reel under severe power cuts ranging from one to five hours due to gap in demand and supply, prompting the Delhi Government to direct the private discoms to arrange additional power and strengthen their distribution network. After a meeting with CEOs of all the three discoms, Power Minister Harun Yusuf said, "Direction has been issued to companies to arrange additional power to tide over the situation. As per the agreement, it is the responsibility of the distribution companies to arrange power and ensure uninterrupted supply to the consumers.
They have been told to arrange power and I assured them all required help. The Delhi Government would soon approach the Union Power Ministry to allocate more power to the city. With temperature continuing to hover over 42 degrees Celsius, power demand in the city remained high but it came down by 38 mega watt from yesterday's the all time high of 4,823 MW".
