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| Omar looks at namesake to retrieve Valley from cold darkness | | | Early Times Report
SRINAGAR, Dec 30: State Chief Minister Omar Abdullah by his own admission has confirmed that the State government is helpless in improving the disastrous electricity situation in the Valley. The Chief Minister has requested the separatist leader Mirwaiz Omar Farooq to ask the people to desist from electric power pilferage.
He also disclosed he would approach the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh so that more power is imported into the State especially the Valley that has been reeling under an unprecedented electric power supply crisis. Omar Abdullah said the State government was incurring huge losses of Rupees 2000 crores annually to import power into the State. This he attributes largely to the misuse of electricity in the Valley and the Jammu region.
By seeking the intervention of the separatist leaders in a subtle manner though, the Chief Minister has accepted that his administration is completely helpless in checking the pilferage of energy in the Valley. This is something any other Chief Minister would think twice before going public on his admission.
How can an ordinary consumer resort to misuse and violations of the agreed load unless this is aided and abetted by the officials of the electricity department either at the higher levels or at the levels of the department's field staff? The answer to this has completely been left by the Chief Minister to the imagination of the people.
Winter has always been the nightmare for the people of the Valley especially because the first thing to strike them during the biting cold is the absence of electricity. The State government's promise of uninterrupted power supply in metered areas has also proved to be yet another unfulfilled promise. There have been shutdowns, curtailments, breakdowns and all other allied system failures those have resulted in routine disruptions of electric power supply during the last two months in the Valley.
Sometimes the officials of the PDD have been blaming the overloading of transformers and receiving stations by unscrupulous consumers and at other times they have been blaming the unscheduled cuts imposed by the northern grid authorities from where the State imports power during the winter months.
It is strange that despite optimum discharge in the rivers during the summer months the State does not export enough power to support its winter demands when the water discharge in the rivers is low.
The reasons advanced by the PDD and the Chief Minister are basically excuses for the failures of an inefficient and corrupt system that has eaten into the vitals of every sphere of public activity including the supply of electricity to the residents of the Valley.
It should be left to the wisdom of the Chief Minister and his team of advisors to find out why and how the electric supply scenario was running to the satisfaction of the common man in the Valley during the regime of former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Syed. After, the Mufti did not have a magic wand. Or did he? |
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