Srinagar, June 21: With power woes growing in J&K, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Thursday asked people to pay market price for consuming electricity or else bear with load shedding. He was critical about the consumers who resort to power theft.
Jammu and Kashmir Government has been struggling to improve power generation capacity and make improvements in Transmission and Distribution losses which are over 58 percent- highest in any State. Faced with this scenario the State Power Development Department is resorting to frequent load shedding which is adding to woes of people in prevailing heat conditions.
Omar who also holds Power portfolio justified his statement on micro-blogging site twitter.com by pointing towards those who indulge in power theft and huge T&D losses. “I've been very transparent about the power situation in the State. The 70 per cent loss/theft situation is unsustainable, so load shedding happens,” Omar wrote. “Power in J-K is the second cheapest in the country after Sikkim. How about all of you, complaining about load shedding, start paying market price,” he said.
Not only the non-metered areas, metered areas too have been subjected to acute power cuts after the new power schedule by announced by the PDD.
Though the metered areas are supposed to get uninterrupted power supply, Omar wrote, “Metered areas, where earlier there was no loss, now has massive amounts of theft and bypassing of meters. So metered areas face load shedding,” he said.
Omar was critical about consumers in non-metered areas as well, “Non-metered areas resist installation of meters because they don't want to pay for power that they use. Much happier under-disclosing load.”
But Omar admitted that some officials of the department were in nexus with consumers in power theft. “The theft doesn't happen without collusion in the department which is why the process of un-bundling the T&D sector has been started,” he said. “So while it’s easy to blame Government for everything, so (me) amount of soul searching is also called for. Till then load shedding is a reality,” he added.
Despite funding by the Government of India to curb the T&D losses, J&K has not shown any improvement on the front.
J&K’s peak generation hovers around 758-MW from its hydropower projects while its peak demand is over 2200-MW. Though it has started work on several projects, some of them in early ’70s, they have not been completed while the power demand continues to grow. The gap in the power requirement is filled by import from Northern Grid.
The PDD is resorting to forced cuts in J&K to balance between the requirement and definite schedule for energy import which stands at 670 MW.
In Kashmir the PDD has made 15 groups of different receiving stations across the Valley. “The power cuts are forced in these groups individually to balance the energy requirement,” said an official. The same procedure is followed in Jammu region.
The official said against the requirement of 750 MW in Kashmir in the evening today the forced cut is more than 100 MW.
“The forced cut is must to overcome the overdrawing of power from Northern Grid which will cost State more money per unit of import,” the official said.
Another official said the only solution to the problem is increasing generation capacity. “Otherwise these short term measures cannot be sustained for too long,” he said.

Lastupdate on : Thu, 21 Jun 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Thu, 21 Jun 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 IST