Every year, ahead of the monsoon, the Goa Electricity Department’s sub-stations undertake planned power shutdowns to carry out maintenance works. To receive better power supply, the citizens too willingly undergo hardships for several hours, especially on the weekends. However, this year, just days later villages and towns started facing power outages, and the authorities concerned pushed the blame on the ill-maintenance of the lines.
On May 21 this year, the power transmission to the whole of South Goa was shut from 7 am to 3 pm to carry out maintenance works. In the last fortnight, the entire district has been facing power outages at some point or the other and the officials of the Electricity Department have attributed the frequent power outages to insulators, conductors and the overhead power line supplying electricity from Ambewadi, Karnataka. The Chief Electrical Engineer has stated that the Department is encountering difficulties in performing maintenance work due to their reliance on the sole power supply source for the district.
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If that was not enough, Power Minister Ramkrishna Dhavalikar, who has been part of consecutive governments for decades, has said that insulators and conductors of the high-tension power lines in Goa have not been replaced for several decades. He advocated underground cabling to eliminate these equipment-related issues.
It’s almost two decades since Goa became the first state in the country, in December 2003, under the leadership of then Power Minister Digambar Kamat, to receive the go-ahead for an underground cabling project – under the Accelerated Power and Reform Development Programme (APRDP), initially to begin with in Panjim and Margao with an allocated fund of Rs 67 crore. But, two decades later, the underground cabling works are far from completion. The Power Minister claims that the works could be completed in another two years, but there are no positive signs to confidently accept that claim.
Towards the fag end of his tenure, former Power Minister Nilesh Cabral in October 2021, acknowledged that Goa’s electricity infrastructure was bad and the government was looking at setting up new infrastructure having a utility value of three-four decades. While the plans seem to be fine, it is also important to ensure that red-tapism does not choke such projects, as huge delays then leads to making the technology redundant by the time of the project is completed.
This on one hand is a loss to the exchequer; on the other, the hardships of the citizens continue. The evidence is before everyone, Goa’s villages and towns are dug up every now and then, either for laying underground cables or rectifying the same.
To add to the woes, the Electricity Department is functioning on a nearly 50 percent manpower deficit, and this includes training staff to engage in the problems occurring at the site of the underground cables. In addition, in villages and towns across the State, creepers are seen covering the electricity poles and wires which increases the possibility of wires snapping and posing serious threats to human lives.
Since the Power Minister has claimed that the equipments and infrastructure accessories have not been replaced for decades, he should order an inquiry into the purchase and supply of these equipments and accessories along with their warranty period and the responsibility for the wear and tear. Over the last two decades under different schemes, the Goa Government has spent crores of rupees from providing LED bulbs to every household to erecting LED street lights across the State. The government should come out with a white paper on the infrastructure investment in the Electricity Department and set accountability for the failures in accomplishing the desired results. Despite the enormous public funds spent in the name of providing uninterrupted power supply, citizens literally continue to grope in the dark.
