Hyderabad: Frequent power cuts irk citizens

Hyderabad: At a time when the Telangana government proudly claims it’s a power surplus state and will suffer no power cut even for a fraction of a second, the frequent power outages are puzzling citizens who are being asked to disbelieve their own experiences.

Consumers from several parts of the city are complaining of power cuts. In the past few days, West Maredpally, Miyapur, and Dilsukhnagar suffered power cuts for between three and five hours at different times of the day.

These unscheduled power cuts have become a common occurrence and feature in tweets from citizens. Contrary to what the Telangana government claims about the official mechanism being citizen-friendly and responding immediately to their grievances, officials at TS Transco and Discoms seem to be least bothered about complaints.

TS Southern Power Discom says there have been no scheduled power cuts in the city, which is of no comfort to people baking in the heat.  A divisional engineer from TSSPDCL told this newspaper: “Only power cuts caused by maintenance work, load-shedding or deficit power supply are considered as official outage. Tree cutting at Mahendra Hills has caused some inconvenience to citizens, but it was for a short stint only.”

He also blamed the wind as tree branches hit electricity wires causing tripping of transformers. According to the data with TSSPDCL, the scheduled power outages were over by May 13 and electricity supply was affected due to maintenance work, tree cutting, master plan work, erection of DTR, 33 KV Line stringing work, etc. The demand for energy from June 1-5 varied from 137.948 MUs to 147.185 MUs and there was no deficit in power supply, as per to TS Transco.