Outages continue in Gurugram; erratic supply, allege residents

Residents in several areas of the city, including those living in societies in DLF Phases 1, 2 and 3 are continually facing long and frequent power outages due to erratic supply, residents alleged on Monday.

They said that despite the rain and the dip in temperature over the last few days, there has been no respite from power cuts that often last for a couple of minutes to hours at a stretch, occurring intermittently throughout the day. Besides, residents also complained of low voltage either due to overloading or faults in feeders or transformers.

According to the residents, the long power outages take place mainly during early morning, evening and late at night that aggravate their troubles since water pumps also cannot be switched on due to erratic power supply triggering a water crisis as well.

Gurugram residents alleged that the ongoing blame game between the power discom and local developers was further escalating the crisis with neither of them willing to take the responsibility to improve infrastructure for continuous power supply in the city.

Dhruv Bansal, residents’ representative of DLF City said, everyday they were facing power cuts for at least three to four hours throughout the day. He said that the internal power supply infrastructure is old and was developed by DLF initially but the load on it has increased due to further construction and an increase in the number of residents.

“Transformers of both developers as well as the Dakshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam Limited (DHBVN) are installed inside our societies. While the developer says the DHBVN will take care in case of any issue, discom officials say it is the developer who needs to hand over the infrastructure to them after fulfilling conditions,” he said.

Shikha (goes by her first name), a DLF Phase-I resident, said they were fed up with the situation. “The erratic power supply is adding to our problems as the outages happen when it’s time to run the water pumps,” she said.

Chaitali Mandhotra, Ardee City RWA representative, said the power supply crisis in their society was resolved after DHBVN installed a 400kV transformer to mitigate overloading. “We had been facing tremendous outages until a fortnight back but now the supply is smooth and due to this, the water supply is also good,” she added.

Shalini Pannu, DHBVN executive engineer, sub-urban division, said there are several pockets in some specific areas of DLF City where a 40kW transformer has been used for multiple-storey houses built on 60 square yard plots. “There is a limit to which the infrastructure of a specific area can be developed. These pockets thus face outages. There are a few blocks which face outages when change-over of power supply from one substation to another takes place,” she said.

Meanwhile, Satish Kumar, DHBVN executive engineer, Manesar division, said that the developer Vatika India was to construct three 33kV switching substations for Vatika India Next but none of them have been built. “They have also sought a stay from the high court on submitting a bank guarantee of about ₹44 crore against these stations to DHBVN,” he said.

“The society residents are being supplied power from two 11kV feeders connected to a 66kV substation in Harsaru. Due to these constraints, all the residents of the area are facing outages from overloading,” he said adding until the substations are constructed outage issues will not be resolved in the area.