Sarthak Kanjilal
Port Blair, September 15: Severe Power crisis in Port Blair city in last several weeks have left people of South Andaman region, high and dry. Inaction of Andaman Administration and total silence forced thousands of people to protest in roads, which ultimately resulted in lathi charge, stone pelting, injuries and arrests.
Finally the Andaman and Nicobar Administration has today assured that residents of South Andaman will not have to suffer Power Crisis in coming days as the Administration has now taken all possible measures to prevent power crisis.
Addressing a press conference today at Secretariat Conference Hall the Chief Secretary of A & N Administration, Mr. Anindo Majumdar today said that the Administration is very concerned about the inconvenience caused to the public due to the long hour’s power cut.
In a Press Conference held at the Mini Conference Hall at the Secretariat Building today at 07:00pm, the CS said that the Administration tried out all the efforts to come out of the power crisis but they couldn’t do anything. “Even after lot of efforts we didn’t get any output,” CS said.
Mr Anindo later said that before 20th July the peak load capacity required was 36-38 MW and the Power department had around 35 MW to provide electricity which was close.
He said that unfortunately on 20th July the workers of the SPCL went to a strike following some fault of their own employer because of which 7.8MW power supply interrupted.
“To solve the SPCL problems the administration going out of the way and in a humanitarian ground agreed to pay the salaries of the employees of the SPCL through Labor Department but after they resumed the job the machines of the SPCL developed technical snags,” said CS.
He further said that after this on 3rd of this month, a 2MW unit broke down due to purely mechanical failure which is going to take a long time to get repaired and that was the reason that the city suffered such a power crisis issue.
The Chief Secretary further said that however after tremendous efforts the administration is in the road to recovery and by today the Power Department has the capacity of 29MW.
“As we have not achieved the actual mark yet the load shedding will continue but it will now come down to only 3 hours a day,” said the CS.
The CS further said that to tackle with the current problem the existing agreement for procurement of 10MW power from M/s Sudhir Reddy Gensets Consortium, New Delhi is signed on 27.07.2017 and is being enhanced by adding another 1.2 MW which will be added by Monday i.e 18.09.2017. Further, two more new DG sets as per agreement signed will be having capacity to deliver extra 2MW load by November, 2017.
The CS said that a new agreement for enhancement of additional 5MW power from M/s New Bharat Engineering, Navi Mumbai will be signed within a week and the company has already procured two new 1 MW DG sets which has reached Port Blair on 12.09.2017 and likely to be commissioned by next 7-8 days, adding 2MW to the grid. The company is procuring 04 more new 01 MW DG sets which is likely to reach Port Blair by November, 2017.
CS said that the letter for award for establishment of 15 MW hiring power plant to procure power has been issued to M/s Perenial Technologies Pvt. Ltd, Pune on 01.09.2017 and the agreement will be signed by next week. CS said that the company will commission 05MW within first week of November, 2017 and remaining 10 MW by January, 2018.
The CS further also told the media about the long term plan and told about the proposal for establishment of 30MW LNG based Power Plant extendable upto 50 MW and presently the feasibility study of the project is on.
