National Capital continues to reel under power outages, water shortage

It is 6 am and the family of Pradeep Sharma is sitting in their balcony swinging paper fans. They have been doing this turn by turn for the past two hours as there is no power supply in the area. “Even the inverter battery is down now and we are left with no other option,” said Sharma, a resident of Krishna Nagar.

Delhi, in last week, witnessed the hottest days of the season with the temperature swelling up to 46° Celsius in  Palam. The power demand reached its peak with many areas left with long power outages. 

“The electricity pole in our area caught fire because of which the supply was affected. There was no power supply for more than 6 hours. The situation may get worse in the coming days as the demand will go up,” said BS Vohra, president of Federation of east Delhi RWAs.

The maximum load on Friday was 6,008 megawatt (MW) and the minimum load recorded was 3,875 MW. On Thursday, the maximum load was 6,029 MW and the minimum was 3,728 MW. Recently, Delhi Power Minister Satyendar Jain wrote to Union Railway and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal seeking immediate help to restore uninterrupted power supply in the city.

“Whatever they try to do, the power supply is never uninterrupted. Sometimes, we receive messages in advance from the companies about the power cuts. But even after that, the duration is not always same as mentioned in those messages,” said Harshit Kumar, a resident of Kamla Nagar.

The tree power distribution companies (discoms) in Delhi — BYPL, BRPL and TPDDL — have made arrangements to prevent power outages due to their fault. However, because of a shortage in supply, the discoms have started load-shedding.

Earlier this month, Jain said that power cuts were due to the poor state of power plants maintained by discoms. He, however, announced that consumers would be compensated for outages of more than two hours and stated that the government had asked the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission to penalise the discoms for cuts beyond two hours.

The water crisis

Several parts of the Capital are also facing an acute water shortage including South Extension-II, Mehrauli, Rohini and Vasant Kunj, among others.“Four blocks in our locality have been facing an acute water shortage as the DJB supplies water for a few days and then without any prior information stops the supply for over a week. We have written to the chief minister repeatedly, however, our letters have not yielded any good for us. We are now forced to get water through private water tankers which take a toll on our pockets,” said SK Mittal, a resident of K block, South Extension II.

Unlike every year, the action plan’s focus, officials said will not be on increasing the number of water tankers, rather on improving efficiency and faster redressal of complaints. According to a 2015 DJB report, at least 40 per cent of water is wasted in leakages. Then around 20-30 per cent is waste water which is not recycled or used efficiently. Also, there are infrastructure issues such as low capacity and improper functioning of booster pumping stations, which are used to supply water to a large number of colonies, the report stated.

Understanding the crisis, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking his intervention to solve the water problem. In his letter, Kejriwal said the city has been receiving 1,133 cusecs of water from Haryana since 1996, but recently, for the first time in 22 years, the neighbouring state has contested Delhi’s right over this water and partially stopped the supply to the city.

STEPS TAKEN

The south Delhi district administration on Friday launched a drive against water mafias in the Devali and Sangam Vihar areas, during which four borewells were sealed while the owner of five underground tanks was directed to demolish those. At five sites, underground water tanks were found, he said, adding that pipelines were sealed.