Power cuts hit industry
Ruchika M. Khanna
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 21
Erratic power supply in Haryana and Punjab has brought the industrial production in the region to a grinding halt. With the industry in the region having to face unscheduled power cuts and compulsory off days (24 hours in Punjab), industrial production has drastically come down.

Industrialists say on the one hand, the recession has begun to take its toll on their profit margins, on the other, the state governments are doing little to ensure regular power supply. In Haryana, industrialists rue that they are facing a shortage of cash inflows and it was becoming difficult to shell out more money for running the units on captive power.

Since generation of captive power is two times more expensive than the power supplied by the state power utilities, industrialists in Haryana said they were now forced to dig in their cash reserves for captive power generation, rather than spending on industrial expansion.

Ramesh Verma, a handloom exporter from Panipat, said they had to make do with just eight hours of power supply. “It’s a double whammy for industry here. On the one hand, we have had to reduce our profit margins to bag export orders, on the other, we also have to spend additional money on captive power generation so that we can dispatch our orders in time,” he said.

Sources in the Haryana Power Utilities informed TNS that as against a supply of 790 lakh units (LUs), the demand had shot up to 820-840 LUs per day. “Though we are trying to bridge the demand and supply gap by purchasing power from all available sources, there are still gaps and we have to introduce cuts,” said a senior official. He, however, said there was just four-hour cut on industry.

Bharat Rattan, general secretary of Panchkula Small Scale Industrial Association, said the unscheduled power cuts were on the rise. “It is easy to manage industrial production if the power cuts are scheduled, but now we never know when the cut would be imposed. These unscheduled cuts also lead to heat losses in most industrial units because by the time the furnaces heat up to optimum temperature, the power goes off and the entire process has to be repeated,” he said.

In Punjab, too, industry has been dealing with one compulsory weekly cut, besides several unscheduled cuts on industry. As against a demand of 1,350 LUs a day, the power availability is just 1,250 LUs a day. A Ludhiana-based steel rolling mill owner said while they had got used to a compulsory weekly off, which has been in force for the past two years, it was getting difficult to work with such unscheduled power cuts. “Now that the elections are over and with paddy transplantation season about to begin, the situation will only worsen,” he said.