GURGAON: More than five thousand families living in the Vatika India Next township were left without power supply for more than 30 hours, from Sunday morning till Monday afternoon.
According to t residents, a fault at the underground cable triggered an outage around 4am on Sunday and was only rectified by 7pm the same day. The residents’ relief, however, was short-lived as another breakdown was reported at Garhi-Harsaru powerhouse around 11:30pm, disrupting the supply to several societies in sectors 82, 83, 84, 89, among others. Supply was not restored until 2:30 pm on Monday.
Residents say that they have been suffering due to frequent, hours-long outages these last few months. Both the developer and DHBVN have failed to provide uninterrupted supply, they alleged.
“This is not the first time that power supply was interrupted for such a long time as there was no electricity for 14 hours on August 14 due to a fault in the power cable. Apart from this, there are daily cuts happening and both the developer and DHBVN are passing the responsibility on to each other. Moreover, the developer has not been able to build the requisite infrastructure of a 33 kV switching station despite nine years of since possession was started,” said Amresh Mishra, RWA president of Vatika Lifestyle Homes.
Lokesh Yadav, a resident of K block, noted that the existing infrastructure is unable to meet the township’s growing power demands. “While the developer is not willing to fulfil its obligation to provide the necessary power infrastructure, the DHBVN is also not compelling them to do so,” he said.
Frequent power cuts, residents say, has put a dent on their monthly budgets as they are forced to depend on DG set for power back-up, for which they have to pay around Rs. 30 per unit.
Speaking on Sunday’s outages, the spokesperson of Enviro-facility management said, “An electrical fault was observed on Sunday morning but due to bad weather, it became difficult to climb up on 11kV H-poles for carrying out Hi pot test with the help of fault locating machine. Rainy weather requires us to observe extra safety precautions. Later on the fault was identified but it was found to be beneath GMDA road, which further needed coordination with government authorities, for digging it. Power finally resumed at 7pm.”
When contacted, a DHBVN official said, “A fault was detected after the blast occurred in the vacuum circuit breaker around 11:30pm on Sunday. We had tried to resume the supply by 5 am after repairs but there was no success. Another VCB was used, and the supply was restored around 2:30 in the afternoon. There was an internal fault that occurred on Sunday morning in the township and DHBVN has no mandate to rectify it.”