After respite, Gurgaon reels under outages

GURGAON: After a gap of about a month, long and frequent power cuts are back to haunt the residents of the Millennium City. Almost all the localities in the city have been reporting seven to eight hours of power cuts since the past several days. Strangely, some of residents haveblamed the Metro for the outages.
"We have noticed that ever since the Metro has started running in Gurgaon, power situation has become worse.It is probably because a large chunk of the supply is being diverted to DMRC. It’s very unfair. Residents are suffering due to the short-sightedness of our policy makers and authorities," said Akanksha, a resident of Sushant Lok.
Authorities, meanwhile, maintained that the power cuts in recent weeks were due to acute shortage of manpower in the electricity department. Because of this, local faults were not getting fixed. "We had a high-level meeting over the issue recently and it was decided that the services for maintenance will be outsourced. Even if a fuse blows up in some area, it does not get fixed immediately and this causes a lot of inconvenience to the people," claimed a DHBVN official.
Residents, meanwhile, dismissed the claims of the officials saying that these were just lame excuses to hide the fact that power supply to the city was not adequate. "The year has been particularly bad for the city. The power situation during winter hinted at an acute crisis in the summer and this is what is happening. Even as the city’s power demand have risen to 1.4-1.5 crore units at this time of year, the supply is very short," said R S Rathi, president of Gurgaon Citizens’ Council.
Meanwhile, power consumption data by DHBVN revealed that the electricity supply in the city in residential sector was just over 1 crore unit per day. "During high humidity conditions like this when every house runs at least 2-3 air-conditioners round the clock, power demands get really high. We are doing our best to meet the requirements. However, there is some problem because there is a shortage of supply from power generating plants in Hisar, Panipat, Faridabad, etc," the DHBVN official added.
Meanwhile, residents of areas developed by private builders complained that the situation was indeed bad. "A tussle between DLF and DHBVN has been going on for long over who should upgrade the power transmission system in the township, but so far they have not arrived at a solution. Even as load on the system has increased manifold during the last 8-10 years, we continue to have a old transmission system. As a result problems like transformer breakdowns, line tripping are frequent," rued Rathi, a resident of DLF Phase-I.