What is Punjab known for? The grains that it produces and the merry, joyous people it boasts of. But unfortunately, the people of Punjab are far from merry at the moment. I am only trying to analuse the situation and for ease and convenience, I will use the name Punjab for "punjab and haryana" belt of our country. There was a time when Punjab had surplus electricity. Not anymore! Punjab needs 800 lakh units in WINTERS. And what do we have? Mere 600 lakh units. Now you can well imagine the state of affairs in summers. I have been in Punjab for the last 7 days and it is like a "hell-on-earth" kinda experience. The power is gone for at least 8 hours every day. There's no upper limit, of course! The current is gone for so long that no inverter can be charged for use. The only option left is to have fuel-guzelling, pollution creating, and noisy generators.
Reasons:
This is because the water level at the Bhakra reservoir has declined and so has the power generation. The untimely shutdown of two units of the Bathinda thermal plant and two of the Ropar plant has also contributed to the demand-supply gap.
The employees of the state electricity board are frequently on strike for some or other reason. Nothing is done about this grossly unprofessional attitde.
The board is tremendously over-staffed. But who has the guts to trim the fat?
Nobody cares about the transmission and distribution losses, power theft etc.
The board makes huge losses on institutional consumers who fail to make timely payments. Does it do anything about that? Naah!
When the demand estimate is known, there should be no delay in the purchase of additional power. But the electricity board is always found making excuses like a fund crunch. Whu can't they take care of things like right-sizing, reducing losses and thefts etc? The other excuse given to us is that the paddy crop requires so much of water that the power has to be diverted to agriculture sector. They forget that we have had the best monsoon in 40 years this season. What happened to all that rain-water? Did we, the consumers drink it up? Does anybody really care about our situation?
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