Sole lift in power dept’s head office lies defunct for almost a month

Panaji: Goa’s electricity department is often the butt of ridicule for failure to maintain uninterrupted power to Goan homes. Now the department is facing scorn from its own employees for failing to repair the only lift in the five-storied head office building – Vidyut Bhavan - in Panaji.
Electricity department staff told TOI that the only lift in the building has been down for almost a month.This has caused acute inconvenience to its staff and also to power consumers who visit the office for official purpose.
Not only has the lift not been repaired, but officials have not even cared to remove the mocking poster put on the lift door by some disgruntled staff. The large handwritten poster ridicules the management for failure to repair the lift.
Electricity department staff state that a big worry over the non-working lift is that some of their colleagues working in the building are heart patients. They fear that climbing the stairs may trigger heart attacks among these staff members.
Also, many citizens (power consumers) visit the office for official purposes, often to correct their electricity bills. Some of these are senior citizens who have great difficulty climbing the stairs. Department staff said they have to make these elderly people sit in their offices, till they are able to resume their walk up to the next floor.
When TOI visited the electricity department on Friday, the third floor was packed with people attending interviews. Department staff told TOI that there were interviews during all of last week. There were interviews for meter readers, for licensing board supervisor license and for electrical contractors. Not only were all these people inconvenienced, even the chief electrical engineer S Lekshmanan has to undergo the daily rigour of climbing stairs to reach his third floor office.
In his 2015-16 budget, chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar has allocated 2126.57 crore to the electricity department (plan and non-plan), a hike of over 600 crore. While the delay in repairing the only lift in the building has thrown up conspiracy theories and charges of corruption, electricity department public relations officer T A Verghese, said that the lift company OTIS was not responding to several requests to repair the lift.
Verghese said the lift was 25 years old, that its major parts requiring replacement are not available and that the company concerned was finding the work of repairing the lift unprofitable. The public relations officer said that the lift would be repaired soon.