Jammu Kashmir has landed into a deep electricity crisis and the UT is now 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 hapless people have to bear the brunt of irregular and erratic power cuts which has invited a series of protests at numerous places in Jammu and elsewhere.
All political parties have come out against the power outage and are pulling the Administration for its failure in providing basic necessities to the people. Expressing concern over the dwindling situation of electricity supply in the Jammu region, Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI), Jammu on Tuesday urged LG Manoj Sinha to take all possible steps for providing 24X7 power to bail out industry and common households from the crisis.
The government has declared Jammu and Srinagar as smart cities with all the modern facilities and the work on making Jammu and Srinagar as smart cities has begun but Jammu is reeling under the electricity shortage and people are suffering a lot in the absence of regular electricity.
The unscheduled and long duration power cuts and fluctuations in the Jammu region during the prevailing blistering heat wave have pushed the people into a hell-like situation where even to pass a few hours becomes nightmarish. Even the fully metered areas are not spared power outages varying from 6 to 9 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 Tuesday in a meeting held at Srinagar expressed his concern about the unreasonable and unexplainable power transmission losses (TL) and instructed the department to manage the big gap and share the problems and issues involved in power scenarios with the people. Instead of admitting the failures on their part, the officials of PDD have tried to justify the power cuts to the unavailability of power or huge cost of purchase and increase in the power consumption load which they have termed over 30 per cent.
Better the department should find out the solution and meet the huge shortfall of power energy by improving the generation, purchasing more volume of power, checking effectively the power theft and proper regulation of distribution instead of passing the buck to increase in consumption and unavailability.
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 who feel breathlessness.
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 J&K the way it could have. The production lines fail because there is no adequate supply of electricity.
For the last few days the 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. These power cuts turn everything dark and breathless. The outage must stop forthwith.
