Jammu has been preparing for the hot, humid, choking and dark season. Repetitive tall claims by all sorts of who’s who in Jammu and Kashmir over the past two decades on providing sufficient power supplies to the people are now taken just as bragging and nothing more. The situation is very bad in the towns of Jammu Division and still worse in its rural areas.
The unscheduled and long duration power cuts and fluctuations in the Jammu region during prevailing blistering heatwave have pushed the people into a hell-like situation when even to pass a few hours becomes nightmarish. Even the fully metered areas are not spared power outages varying from 3 to 7 hours are enforced. The reasons for this shortfall are well known and the problem has been discussed over and over again. But we are no were near any solution to this problem. No matter how much we cry, how much we protest on the streets, write or speak about the problem in the media, there are no chances of the people of this place getting an undisturbed power supply.
The chief secretary, Arun K Mehta today in a meeting expressed his concern about the unreasonable and unexplainable power transmission losses (TL) and instructed the department to manage the big TL gap and fix the accountability. Instead of admitting the failures on their part, the officials of PDD have tried to justify the power cuts huge increase in the power consumption load which they have termed over 29 per cent.
Better the department should find out the solution and meet the huge shortfall of power energy by improving the generation, checking effectively the power theft and proper regulation of distribution instead of passing the buck to increase in consumption.
If the governments keep that in mind, they would keep it at the top of the priority list and follow it till the problem is really solved. The frequent power cuts affect our older people in the families feel breathlessness. Power cuts may also prove fatal for Covid-19 patients who are on oxygen support at their homes and also expressed his concern for inadequate power supply for the patients (Covid19) who are on power-driven oxygen support otherwise our hospitals have to deal with the burden.
The long hours of darkness adversely impact the students who could utilise the lockdown and restrictions better if there was an uninterrupted power supply. This alone would amount to a huge loss at a collective level. Now take the case of the economy. The industrial sector is totally dependent on the power supply. One of the reasons why the industrial sector couldn’t pick up in the J&K the way it could have. The production lines fail because there is no adequate supply of electricity.
For the last few days power crisis has badly hit normal life. Every day, the electricity suddenly goes off for hours. There is no timing. It goes off anytime. The matter is serious for the government it should mind it that cumulatively costs of disruption in electricity are too high to be ignored. These power cuts turn everything dark and breathless. The outage must stop forthwith.
