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| Summer woes: Power outages continue to haunt Jammu people | | No progress on upgrading power distribution project, system limited to mere 1100 MWs | | Early Times Report
Jammu, May 26: Alleged failure of the Power Department to upgrade the existing power structure in Jammu division has begun to show its darker sides with an increase in temperatures, the outages have started dominating the scenes all across.
As per the reports, the existing power infrastructure is able to bear a load of a mere 1100 MW due to which there is a huge wedge between the supply and demand. As the PDD was tasked to upgrade the existing system, its failure and dilatory mode of functioning is now giving sleepless nights to Jammuites for no-fault of theirs. Though the target to upgrade the existing power distribution system was set as March 2022, it seems that not even half of the work has been completed and that the project will miss the deadline. This means that with an even a slight rise in mercury, the outages will become the order of the day.
The up-gradation of existing power reforms is not the only project on which work is going at snail’s pace.
The present status of Integrated Power Development Scheme (IPDS), Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram JyotiYojana (DDUGJY), Prime Minister’s Development Package(PMDP) and several other schemes is in absolute doldrums.
The DDUGJY was otherwise meant to provide continuous power supply to rural areas in Jammu and Kashmir. The scheme was intended to initiate much-awaited reforms in the rural areas. It was set to focus on feeder separation (rural households & agricultural) and strengthening of sub-transmission & distribution infrastructure including metering at all levels in rural areas. This would have helped in providing round-the-clock power to rural households and adequate power to agricultural consumers. The earlier scheme for rural electrification viz. Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY) has been subsumed in the new scheme as its rural electrification component. However, as in J&K, the scheme was approved by the GOI, tenders from the interested parties were invited in April 2016. Much to the embarrassment of the helmsmen in JK, no major contracting firm expressed any interest in taking up the work.
Further, the failure of the implementation of Restructured Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Programme (R-APDRP) a failure in Jammu and Kashmir, was also discussed at threadbare. As the transmission and distribution losses mount in the state of Jammu and Kashmir with the consumers bearing the brunt of load shedding, the scheme was launched amid much fanfare with the aim to reduce the T&D losses.
For the first phase of the project, the Central government had sanctioned Rs.151.99 crores under R-APDRP while an amount of Rs.1665.27 crores had been approved for the second phase of this vital project. These schemes were proposed to be taken up under National Electricity Fund for which Rural Electrification Corporation is the nodal agency. Under this scheme 30 towns have been identified as project areas in J&K state with a population of above 10,000 as per 2001 census. |
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