NEHU Shillong facing power shortage

Students in the premier North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Meghalaya Saturday accused their vice chancellor AN Rai of asking them “to live on biscuits” in the wake of the week-long power failure. The university, one of India’s premier central universities, has been without power from Aug 19 affecting thousands of students and faculty members residing in the sprawling campus.

“The Vice Chancellor asked us to live on biscuits as there is shortage of drinking water for cooking purposes in the hostels,” one of the students claimed. The drinking water in the University is pumped and without power there has been acute shortage of water for drinking, cooking and other day to day usages.

However, Rai rubbished the students’ allegation. “I have never said students should live on biscuits… these are all rumours. Instead, we are trying our best to restore power. Moreover we have hired generators to pump water,” the vice chancellor said. On Friday night, hundreds of students marched to the Vice Chancellor’s residence with candles, gheraoed it and shouted slogans till 11 pm in the night demanding immediate restoration of power and water.The power crisis is due to the failure of the two 3 MVA transformers in the complex. In fact, the standby transformer was out of order from December last year, but was not repaired.

The university’s administration is being blamed for it, with teachers and students saying, the Vice Chancellor tried to cut maintenance cost and the transformers were therefore never given due care. “This crisis will seriously affect research in natural science and engineering subjects wherein some department’s samples for experiments and chemicals need to be kept at minus 20 degrees,” Apurba Kumar Baruah, chairman NEHU Campus Welfare Committee and head of political science department, said. He added: “This loss and its impact on the university are yet to be assessed. It should be noted that a crisis of this nature is unprecedented in the history of any central universities of this country.”

Meanwhile, the university’s administration made some failed attempts to restore power. First, it tried to repair the transformers with engineers from Guwahati. The engineers said it would take at least 45 days to repair the transformers.  Then, it bought a 1 MVA transformer from Guwahati at Rs. 16 lakh, which went broken within hours after it operation as it got overheated taking the entire load of the complex.

“We are trying to get power from the State electricity board, however, due to some technical problem power has not been restored so far,” Rai said Meanwhile, Rai has ordered an independent inquiry to probe into the power crisis. The university is calling a meeting of its highest decision making body, the executive council Monday.