Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, July 20: Chamber of Commerce & Industry has lodged strong protest that the PDD almost for the last two and half months has not been in a position to come up to the expectations of the people as for as the power supply is concerned.
In a meeting held today president CCI, Y V Sharma alleged that the day, the secretariat moved from Jammu to Srinagar, the Power of the PDD to supply power in Jammu also moved with the movement of the Secretariat. People of Jammu started crying on the issue because of the repeated power cuts, breakdowns and interruptions both scheduled and unscheduled resulting into losses of industrial production, losses in the Commercial sector, discomforts in the domestic sector and to thousands of pilgrims visiting both Mata Vaishno Devi and Sri Amarnath. Assurances by the authorities and the spokes person of the Government that lot of money is being spared to set the things right were not fulfilled but to our dismay power supply worsened with every passing day.
It is a matter of great concern that for diverting the attention of the people, PDD launched Voluntary Load Disclosure Scheme (VLDS) without proper guidance to the consumers and started unannounced inspections of the genuine consumers putting them to a lot of harassment. Even the genuine premises were visited more than once by the department and fined heavily without any justification by passing the laid down rules, only to show that PDD have started plugging the leakages and have found fault even with genuine consumers without any reasonable explanation.
Chamber has failed to understand that the time and the motive behind the inspections especially when there is no power supply available to the people. Chamber is for a strong and efficient system which does not allow any pilferage of power but we strongly protest against harassment to the genuine consumers and Government / PDD trying to divert the attention of the people from their own failure and mismanagement of the available power supply and trying to prove that it is the consumer who is at fault.
J&K is probably the only state having Transmission & Distribution losses to the tune of 72% costing the state Rs. 2400 crore annually. The money lost in transmission and distribution losses could be used for strengthening the basic transmission and distribution system as required under Power sector reforms by Central Electricity Authority(CEA), which itself has been funding the state with hundreds of crores of rupees every year for improvement of the Power Sector. How and where the money is spent is known only to the PDD or the Government.
The meeting was also attended by Sham Lal Langer, Sr. vice president, Anil Gupta, Jr. vice president, Arun Gupta, secretary general, Deepak Aggarwal, secretary and Bharat Bhushan Gupta, Treasurer.
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