No power, residents hold protest in Jalandhar's in Maqsudan till 2 am

Tribune News Service

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Jalandhar, July 1

The unscheduled power cuts which are being imposed in the city for the past three days have angered the domestic consumers to the extent that they chose to walk out of their homes past midnight to lodge a protest outside the PSPCL complaint office in Maqsudan till 2 am today.

Their plan to gherao the PSPCL complaint office failed as no one was present in the office to redress their grievance. The residents also alleged that the repeated calls made to the complaint offices last night also went unattended. This left them with the only option to wait endlessly for the power supply to be restored.

In the peak summer season, when the maximum day time temperature is hovering around 45°C and even the night temperature is around 30°C, the residents said the power outages for two to three consecutive hours had made their lives miserable.

The residents have begun venting out their ire against frequent unscheduled power cuts on social media. They have been using hashtags like Punjab Power Cuts, Punjab Electricity Surplus, Bijli ka Waar and others kept on trending on social media on Thursday. Nikhil Kumar, a resident on his social media post rued: “The city is already in the grip of heat wave, therefore, something serious needs to be done about these intermittent power cuts during such a hot weather, especially during nights. He further said: “Due to the poor power supply, even generators aren’t working properly.”

FARMERS ANGRY

As paddy season is on and farmers are not getting adequate supply of power, they have begun ruing that their recently sown paddy crop is getting destroyed. The farmers said since they were not able to water their crop well, they could be facing a big financial loss if the situation does not improve fast.

The farmers in some villages said the power supply that came yesterday started at 12 midnight to 3 am and they missed this time and hence their crop was getting dried. They alleged that if the government was not fully prepared to give power to them, it should not have advised them to transplant paddy from June 10 onwards. Interestingly, some big farmers as in Sansarpur village have hired high power generators to check damage of their paddy crop.

INDUSTRIALISTS SUFFER

To cater to the farmers demand in the residential areas, the PSPCL has today decided to impose a power cut of 48 hours in industries having over 100 kW consumption (category 2 feeders). The local industrialists said the orders came unannounced. “In fact, we got the orders to shut down power from 8 am today at 8:20 am. We were warned against power usage saying that we could face penalties for violation of the order. We had already got our furnaces switched on before that to start the casting works but it all went waste.

Our workers come from far off places like Dasuya, Tanda etc and we could not convey them about holiday well in time. On their insistence, we had to pay them all 50 per cent of their day’s wages without getting the work done. The exporters of hand tool items said they had their orders to be delivered which got stuck up near the end product stage. The mismanagement led to so many issues which the PSPCL officials cannot understand. The officials of the Power Department which led to so much of mess need to be punished for causing us so much harassment”, said Narinder Sagoo, President of Focal Point Extension Association.

PSPCL ADVISORY

While the district is reeling under long power cuts, Harjinder Singh, deputy chief engineer, Jalandhar circle, advised residents to not to leave their heavy load electricity appliances open when power goes off. When left open, the sudden restoration of powers could not only damage the appliances, but also the area transformers. Hence, wait for at least five minutes to switch on the heavy load appliances. In the past few days, many incidents of transformer and feeder damage cases were reported.