Rattan Singh Gill | With the scheduled and unscheduled power cuts being the order of the day, the Power Development Corporation has miserably failed to rescue the people of this state from the tormented phases they undergo, may it a day or a night. Since the days of our childhood, we have been experiencing without an iota of doubt that the much-needed electricity is an optional job for the department of power in J&K. In long and invariable waiting for the power to restore, exhausting of Inverters and Power Backups has added to the woes of people that rendered them helpless, breathless, workless and useless. Mere renaming Power Dev Deptt (PDD) to Power Dev Corporation (PDC) with the same DNA cannot empower it with any magic wand to bring any change in the scenario and proves the re-incarnation powerless and worthless. Better if it would be named as Department of Power Cuts & Kundi Thefts (DPCKT).
While entire Jammu city, without any exception of a locality, suffered the power outage to its worst, with their tolerance spilling over, some people in some localities do come on streets in anger protesting against the power outage but yet it is not everybody's the courage to die cheap of dehydration in this scorching heat just for demanding a soothing fan at home.
We were told over two-weeks back that pains and anguish of the people of Jammu caused by sudden outages, was felt by the top echelons of the Administration and the Chief Secretary after taking a meeting ordered a probe, into the gamut of power cuts, by another high ranking official Shaleen Kabra. The expected report that was supposed to be submitted within a week has not seen the light of the day.
All press statements, releases, hand-outs and announcements from 100 per cent metering, cabling, up-gradation of power transformers, smart metering proved literary ‘Jumlas'. If the texts of all the public statements made by the Power-cut department during the last four decades are scanned, one finds amazingly similar verbatim except for the dateline and the name of the person making the statement.
On Thursday, the Commissioner of Power-cuts, Rohit Kansal in a meeting asked his top Engineers to find out the solution for Gods' sake. The Smart Engineers, who listened more and offended less, pleaded helplessness as the power consumption load racing far ahead with bigger leaps than its availability. They are helpless as according to them the Police get bellyache when asked to register an FIR against an incident of Power theft by Kundi. Department does not have any enforcement powers or agency to nip the evil. Big Power Transformers like those functioning at Narwal and elsewhere are overburdened and at risk. These Transformers are hugely priced and there are two years waiting time for supply if one gets burnt.
Leaving basics and jumping on populism and Adhocism remained the bane of the problem throughout.
The inordinate delay in installing the prime device in-between the consumers' meters and the Department's central controlling server to transfer exact meter-readings that could have stopped the power pilferage and have earned hundreds of crores of rupees by recovery ended in fiasco as the integrating device became unavailable after the Government banned the import from China. There are patchworks of Aluminium Conductors in the running lengths of insulated Cable that facilitate the Kundi system, so on and so forth.
Nobody questions as to why the policy decision of creating an Enforcement Agency of PDD's own Okayed as that could have provided some police personnel under the command of PDD to check the pilferage by strict enforcement. The proposal did not get favour with the Finance Department for funds which they could have earned in plenty by approving so.
All this nitty-gritty is for the Government departments to sort out in their wisdom which they have to recall from grazing meadows. Why should a common man or an honest taxpayer suffer for the feeble-minded bureaucrats or politicians?
Are these summers unusually hot and the power outages really outrageous or is it that our tolerance and expectation levels have changed? While it cannot be denied that God and the Government have jointly and severally chosen to deliver some unkind power cuts to residents in the Jammu region, pointing a finger at those abstract beings makes little sense.
But on the other hand, politicians and the powerful have made the country uninhabitable for ordinary mortals. But all such ranting, legitimate as they may be, does not however exonerate us, the people.
