Hyderabad: Electricity area offices are seeing an influx of requests from local election candidates to reduce power cuts to avoid public anger during campaigning. Sub area and local area offices are being pressurised to do away with an hour or so of power cuts especially on slotted campaigning days.
While power cuts are bad news for the public as well as candidates who are being questioned on the same, the local area officials are juggling with a fixed amount of energy, to accede to the requests.
The state meanwhile continues to reel under a 50 MU energy shortage and the unrestricted peak hour demand is peaking at nearly 13,600 mw.
Going by the statistics provided by the central discom, there is a 25 to 30 per cent continuing deficit which is being passed on as three hours scheduled cuts and a power holiday to the industrial sector.
“The deficit has remained more or less steady over the last one month and we have been managing by imposing scheduled cuts as well as some unscheduled cuts in case of emergencies. With the election campaigning speeding up, there are a number of requests which are rather like directives to cut down on the power cuts,” said superintending engineer from an area sub-station in the city.
In fact the so called “requests” are also specific to time and residential areas and insiders say that politicos have been upset about being questioned on their commitment as they have not been able to ensure power supply.
“Leaders are calling up and even sending their representatives with requests saying that they do not want to enter a charged up residential area during campaigning and hence are giving specific timings to ensure smooth supply, so that they do not face public ire while campaigning. There is a lot of pressure regarding the issue and we don’t really have a choice but to juggle the timings and make things look better up to the campaigning hours. As a result, some amount of night-time cut is being applied,” added another official from the discom.
