Team Herald
MARGAO: Fatorda MLA Vijai Sardesai, councillors Terence Barbosa, Zita Crasto, Lindon Pereira and PWD engineer Nelsie Fernandes held public meetings in three wards. They walked across Wards 2, 3 and 4, which cover the residential areas of Ambajim, Gauliwaddo Chandrawaddo and Dongorwado as part of launch of his ‘Sunday Dialogues’ programme.
“People were extremely happy with this concept. They joined us and walked with us during the entire inspection and we took suggestions from them,” said Sardesai.
Sardesai, the councillors and the PWD engineer carried out inspections at Chandrawaddo, Dongorwaddo and Gauliwaddo areas with the aim of completing the hot-mixing of the entire area before Christmas.
Regarding the power fluctuations in Fatorda constituency, it is learnt from reliable sources that the reason for the same is the step-motherly treatment meted out to the Fatorda sub-station. This sub-station used to earlier receive power from the Verna sub-station, but ever since Reliance stopped supplying power, this load of the Verna Industrial Estate has been taken over by the electricity department. Due to this, Fatorda sub-station has been asked to give up a major part of its allotment from Verna and to draw this load from the Ponda sub-station. However, very often, even this reduced load is not supplied by Verna to Fatorda because of reasons best known to the officers manning the Verna sub-station. The Ponda sub-station officers refuse to release additional load to meet the requirements of Fatorda. This has caused outages in Fatorda over the past two months.
Sardesai criticized the electricity department for the power fluctuations in his constituency. He demanded that the Power Minister intervene in the matter before the residents take to the streets in protest.
“The Power Minister should step in immediately and look into this step-motherly treatment meted out to the citizens of Fatorda, or else the people will be forced to come on to the streets and stop paying their electricity bills to protest against the shoddy service provided by the department,” said Sardesai.
“The power supply to Fatorda constituency has been very erratic and undependable over the last two months and more. This has resulted in a lot of hardships to domestic as well as commercial consumers. The people who bear the brunt of such outages are the common people,” said Sardesai.
