Who stole my business? The power cut did

CHENNAI: It’s not the airconditioner but the refrigerator that Suganya Chakravarthy misses during the powercut between noon and 2pm at her Mylapore home. For Chakravarthy , who supplies made-to-order homemade chocolates for weddings , birthday parties and festivals , the outage means a loss of productive work hours .
“The daily power cut is affecting my business. I am not able to make more than 100 chocolates a day as I need to refrigerate them at a specific temperature to make sure they set properly ,” says Chakravarthy ,who can work only between noon and 4pm when her child is asleep. “Earlier , I used to make four times the number .”
An increase in the duration of scheduled and unscheduled power cuts has affected the work schedules of people like Chakravarthy , who work from home . Since she can make chocolates only in small batches, Chakravarthy starts working on orders at least a week in advance.
“I used to make them fresh , just a day or two before delivery ,” she says. “With the power going off, thetemperaturein thefridge keeps fluctuating and the irregular refrigeration reduces the shelf life of the chocolates.” While it’s just a two-hour outage in Mylapore, M S Pandurngan, who crafts handmade pens at a small scale unit set up at his Tiruvallur home , has to deal with power cuts that stretch between six toeighthours. “We don’t have power from 9am to noon and then again from 3pm to6pm,” saysP andurangan.
“These are the scheduled cuts. The power also goes off again from 6.30pm to 7.30pm and several times during the night,” he says.
Pandurangan employs two people , who help him shape and polish the pens using motorised devises . He has to pay them even though they are not able to do much work. “These are trained people . If I lose them , it will be difficult for me to find skilled workers again ,” says Pandurangan , who has begun working into the night to meet orders.
“I have no other option . A diesel generator that would be able to power all this machinery costs a lot and I can’t afford it,” he says.
To make sure that her work is not affected , Geetha V, who takes online tuitions for students from her home in Tiruvannamalai , installed an inverter that would power her computer . But the long power cuts, that sometimes last 12 hours , mean that she is left without electricity after work.
“I need to be online from 6.30am to 11.30am, when there is no power for at least four hours ,” says Geetha. “I make sure I use the inverter sparingly during the rest of the day so that it doesn’t run out of electricity when I need it for work ,” she says.