PINAKI MAJUMDAR
Jamshedpur, April 29: Over 4 lakh people in major Jharkhand Bijli Vitran Nigam Limited-service areas in and around Jamshedpur suffered intermittent to long power cuts since Thursday night due to short supply of power in Golmuri, Gamharia and other power grid substations.
Around 4 lakh people in Mango, Karandih, Chhota Govindpur, Jugsalai, Bagbera, Sundernagar and Birsanagar, as well as 40,000 more in Ghatshila and Potka, faced intermittent power cuts and prolonged load shedding.
The surge in Celsius has added to the woes.
In some places, load-sheddings kept happening throughout the day on Thursday. Some other areas endured lengthy blackouts of up to over three to four hours.
Over two lakh residents of Mango were inconvenienced by blackouts on Thursday night.
The localities that were affected were Zakirnagar, Daiguttu, Kuar Basti, Munshi Mohalla, Dimna Road, Teacher’s Colony and Post Office Road.
The blackouts, which started from 11 pm and continued till the wee hours, compelled residents of several apartments that do not have generator facilities to spend sleepless nights in muggy conditions.
The JBVNL offices and mobiles of officials were swamped with phone calls enquiring the reason behind the power cut.
For S K Marwah, a resident of Moon City, spending the night without AC and fan was nothing short of a nightmare.
“We couldn’t sleep properly for two consecutive nights. We do not have a generator facility in our flat,” he said.
Homemaker Asha Pandey, a resident of Daiguttu, said the condition was insufferable.
“Even our inverter did not work due to prolonged power cut. Strangely, the state government has implemented a hike in power tariff, but it is not able to provide us quality power,” she complained.
Residents also pointed out that the power supply during the day had also been erratic.
JBVNL officials said that the short supply of power to the grids from the state load despatch centre (SLDC) coupled with technical snags at some places had led to the blackouts.
Various localities serviced by JBVNL continued to face erratic power supply today too.
Both the major power grid substations at Golmuri and Gamharia were getting power supply much below their requirements.
Meanwhile, several localities under the Tata Steel command area including Golmuri and Tinplate face blackouts last night due to a technical snag.
