Chennai: Cyclone-hit residents facing long duration of power outage have turned to rental generators to meet their bare minimum daily requirements including using motor pumpsets to store water in their overhead tanks.
The demand for generators is very high among residents living in individual home as well as apartments to meet their daily electricity requirement with several areas in the city and its suburbs facing power outage since Monday morning.
“Our phones are ringing frequently with calls from residents and industries for renting generators. Normally, the calls will be rare and it will only from industries,” said C. M. Sripathy proprietor of Sree Generators in Retteri.
K. Thandavam, a generator rental service provider in Kolathur, said that most of the residents wanted to rent out the generators for few hours to operate the motor pumps to fill their tanks to meet their water requirement and also to charge their mobiles. “There are apartments which had rented the generators for the last two days to meet their normal daily electricity requirement,” he said.
With the demand for generators skyrocketing, the rental service providers are fleecing residents with charges varying from one rupee per litre to flat Rs 3,000 per overhead tank. "There seems to be no yardstick for charging a consumer seeking generator on rental to merely fill up water tanks.
The owner of the generators was asking to pay same charge of Rs 3,000 flat for a big water tank serving 20 odd flats in an apartment and also to a six-flat apartment. Even as people are suffering, they wanted to make money,” said M. Gunasekaran, a resident of Puthagaram in Kolathur.
In Mayili Amman Nagar and Karanipuducherry in Urapakkam, generators were seeking a rent of Rs 1,000 excluding diesel for individual houses to use motor pumps to fill their water tanks, said R. Umashankar a local resident. Until the power supply is restored to all cyclone affected areas, it would be a good business for the rental generators service providers.
