Santanu Saraswati
Kolkata, May 3— The strongest CPI-M bastion, Burdwan, the district which has always played the major role in selecting party ministers in Bengal cabinet or sending members to central committee or politburo is now facing the onslaught of poor power supply in the district. Burdwan is going to polls on May 7.
Except the newly curved out Lok Sabha seat, Burdwan-Durgapur, the Burdwan East, and Asansol have sitting CPI-M member of parliaments. The region that has even the state power and industry ministers in the seventh Left Front cabinet had to undergo through power cuts varying from five to six hours since past three months and with no hopes of electricity supply settling in near future because of recurrent breakdowns in Durgapur Projects Limited’s (DPL’s) newly installed unit VII. And the worst sufferers are obviously the existing industries in Durgapur Asansol region.
Burdwan gets electricity supply mainly from three power utilities DPL, West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (WBSEDCL) and Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC). While power supply situation in areas under DVC is little better, domestic as well as industrial consumers in areas under WBSEDCL and DPL are going through the ordeal of long hours of power cuts varying from six to seven hours even on a normal day. Few months back, just before retiring from his post, the then executive director WBSEDCL Mriganka Majumdar in an interview to Hindustan Times justified this saying that revenue generation from district is very poor. The WBSEDCL that is in business of power preferred exporting electricity to other states than supplying in districts as it would help the corporation earning profit than going back to square one when the state board had to run with the subsidies from state exchequer.
What added to the Burdwan CPI-M district committee’s pain were a face loss on the issue of acquiring land for the proposed 1320-mega watt ultra mega Katwa thermal power plant and inviting the Chinese multinational power equipment manufacturing major, Dong Fang Electric for developing unit VII of DPL with a capacity of 300-mega watts to cater to the need of the industrial consumers in Durgapur Asansol region. The unit, since it started commercial generation in last year July, never run seven days without any fault. The state industry department, which started promoting this region, as a prospective zone for investment thinking of steady power supply from DPL, is now busy making efforts to keeping them back in the region, as the power utility is generating just 30 per cent of its capacity—126 mega watts out of 445-mega watts—as two of its major units are lying non-functional since April 19 last.
There have been furores—both among the domestic and industrial consumers in Durgapur region, the sub-division that was once developed by then chief minister Bidhan Chandra Ray to give Bengal a new look in business. The most pathetic part is that the area, which is gasping for electricity since January last, elected the state power minister, Mrinal Banerjee, in the last Assembly elections. Recently additional chief secretary power department, Sunil Mitra, directed all the power utilities to generate optimum—just as a face saving measure before the Lok Sabha polls scheduled to be held on May 7 in this region. His directives, however, fell flat, as the Chinese engineers are yet to restore generation in DPL.
EOM
santanu_saraswati@hotmail.com
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