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Power situation shows signs of improvement

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI OCT. 15. Though it has still a long way to go, the North Delhi Power Limited (NDPL) seems to have achieved some measure of success in improving the power supply situation in North and North-West Delhi for which it is responsible for distribution of electricity since July.

While the real test for the North Delhi Power Limited, promoted jointly by the Delhi Government and Tata Power, would come during the winter months when the electricity demand is expected to reach its peak, its performance during the first three months, at least statistically, has shown signs of improvement compared to the Delhi Vidyut Board from whom it took charge in July.

The NDPL Chief Executive Officer, Anil Sardana, claimed that the reliability index of his company was 99.4 per cent. The number of transformer failure has declined from 61 in July to just 40 in October. "The improvement has been due to load control by manual intervention,'' he said. Though cable faults at 33 kV has declined from 24 in July to just eight in October, the faults at 11 kV jumped from 88 to 280 during the same period, which he said was mainly due to rains and 90 per cent of these faults were on old joints.

While in July 83,990 consumers (11 per cent) were affected by power failures, in September it came down to 66,795 (nine per cent). This is because the NDPL has now been clearing ten faults per day on an average as against six in July.

Mr. Sardana asserted that there was significant improvement in revenue collection from its consumers. This was not the case with the DVB earlier. During the first three months, NDPL recovered Rs. 292.22 crores as against total billing of 324.7 crores. It began with a revenue collection of Rs. 87 crores against the billing of 101.55 crores, it jumped to Rs. 107.97 crores against 115.31 crores. As usual the Government agencies were the defaulters.

Making a cautious beginning against power theft, the NDPL is yet to launch a major anti-theft drive particularly in the slums, probably because it is aware of the sensitivity of the situation. As a result, power theft continues unabated. Even most of the various religious functions like Ramlilas have not taken any authorised power connection from the NDPL. Whereas more than 400 such functions are being held in North and North-West Delhi, less than 50 of them had applied for power connection.

However, the company has been concentrating on reaching out to those sections of the society who have not taken electricity connection so far and thus mostly thrive on power theft. So far during the 11 consumer camps held, it has received 5,158 cases and collected Rs. 2.42 crores from the consumers. But for the consumers at large, they remain unsatisfied, as they complain the response time from the NDPL is not satisfactory and it takes hours to send their technicians to rectify the fault. Complaints of no response from Call Centres too keeps pouring in.

Conceding that they have a long way to go, Mr. Sardana said the company was working on a number of measures to improve power situation in the area.

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