Residents of Stanley Road and Beli Colony as well as thousands of other power consumers rudely shaken from sleep due to sudden outage of power at 3,30 am due to reported damage caused to a cable by overbridge construction workers .

BK Singh

At around 3.30 in the wee hours on Thursday when the entire populace was fast asleep power supply disappeared from the Beli Road power station.

Some still snored but the dampness and humidity rudely woke them up from their beds.

As it usually happens there’s no line of communication through mobile between consumers and substation staff once power goes away. Most of the sub-stations supplying electricity to consumers adopt this method of letting the consumer groping in the dark, sweating, and cursing the managers

of power supply . It is a self-evolved practice at the substation.  Staff on duty switched their official phone to flight mode to make consumers feel that they were extremely busy in getting the snag mended. However, in reality, it is not so. They do try to repair in the night but with limited resources, they fail to be of any help.

Incidentally, one consumer at the Beli Sub station on Stanley Road had the mobile number of a temporary mechanic attached to the substation. After frantic calls, he was told by the mechanic that workers engaged in the construction of an overbridge in Muirabad had damaged a big cable leading to outage of the power supply.

So this is the state of affairs prevailing in the power department which has no coordination with other agencies.

They cannot escape the blame of spoiling the sleep of people including children and the elderly.

The power department cannot even say that they were not wary of the possibility of damage to the cable by workers who were working on the bridge all through the night.

Lack of accountability and in coordination with other agencies create such difficult situations for the consumers who is always at the receiving end.

Will officials take any action against staff responsible for harassing consumers?

• Executive Engineer Distribution, Mayo Hall regretted the inconvenience caused to the consumers and assured to get the fault rectified at the earliest.
• He said the power department was committed to better supply to the consumers.