UP power crisis: Government fumbles, Opposition cries foul

Are people in large parts of Uttar Pradesh facing the brunt of having rejected the Samajwadi Party in the just-concluded Lok Sabha elections?

Parts of the state have been going without power for at least 12 hours a day; even the ‘privileged districts’ were suffering on account of unscheduled power cuts.

Drawing first blood, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been pointedly targeting Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, claiming that the state government was indulging in vendetta politics at the peak of the summer season.

Addressing a protest rally in Lucknow on Thursday, UP BJP president Laxmi Kant Bajpai said: “Frustrated on account of the electoral reverses, the Samajwadi Party was showing its anger against people of the state who were being punished for not voting for them.”

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However, the ruling party has been trying to pass the blame to the Centre.

“As against the allotted quota of 6,082 Megawatt out of the central pool, UP was receiving only 4,402 MW. Hence, the prevailing crisis”, official spokesman Rajendra Chaudhary told media persons.

He claimed, “Despite the Centre’s non-cooperation, we were ensuring reasonably good power supply to different parts of the state.”

Claims aside, the fact remains that there was a wide gap between the demand and supply of power in the country’s most populous state.

As against the current demand of 13,500 MW, the total available power was just about 10,500 to 11,000 MW.

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According to state energy expert Shailendra Dube, who heads the national body of power engineers, “other than Lucknow, Noida, SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s hometown Etawah, his daughter-in-law Dimple Yadav’s Lok Sabha constituency Kannauj, prominent minister Azam Khan’s hometown Rampur and Agra where 24- hour power supply was assured, the rest of the state remains in partial darkness.”

He said, “The district headquarters are facing a 10-12 hour power cut every day while bigger cities like Varanasi Allahabad, Kanpur, Meerut and Ghaziabad are going without power for at least 4-8 hours.”

As for the rest of the state, the situation is much worse.

Dube felt that “successive governments were responsible for UP’s power crisis”.

He said, “UP’s power generation has not increased over 2,000 MW over the past 20 years when the annual hike in demand was anything between 5-10 per cent now.”

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Chaudhary, however, maintains: “Several new projects have been taken up by our government, but power generation is a time-taking process. Therefore, we will become self sufficient by 2016.”

Meanwhile, the BJP proposes to intensify its protest demonstrations throughout the state.

Its leadership also seeks to highlight the discriminatory attitude of the government in as much as it was giving special treatment to certain districts.

“The arrangement to ensure 24-hour power supply to a few select districts was in gross violation of the view taken by the high court that had questioned this VIP treatment to such areas,” Laxmi Kant Bajpai pointed out.