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Summer brings with it some of the best fruits that nature has to offer- mangoes, juicy litchis, sweet musk melons, mouth watering pineapples, grapes, watermelons, red plums, kiwis and bright red strawberries and many more. These are the sugar-coated side of summer. The bitter side is that summer also brings the dreaded load shedding that are imposed intermittently. These perennial problems not only make days and nights hard to bear but also financially unbearable for those who chose to buy stand by generators. The commercial capital of Nagaland, Dimapur, has been under siege due to regular load shedding. Power is critical for running and maintaining commercial enterprises. Load shedding is primarily due to worn out equipments that are being gradually replaced but also because of shortage of supply. These two combine to land Nagaland with a huge power and financial deficits that have become part of the power equation. As per estimates, Nagaland buys electricity worth around Rs. 400 crore annually and after selling to consumers, the Department of Power (DoP) is able to recover only Rs.162 crores (as per 2019-2020 statistic). Over the past five years, Nagaland has lost around Rs.1000 crores annually due to inability to effectively recover electricity bills. In the past several years, it was almost a regular feature of the department to announce loss amounting to around of around Rs.200 crore annually which was blamed on supposed theft and pilferage. There is a limit to using the same excuse- pilferage of power(or power theft) or inability to collect billed amount from consumers. Most states in India are making serious efforts to tackle the problem which has proved to be the bottleneck for efficient distribution to a power hungry nation. Power loss in Nagaland attributed to transmission loss is among the highest in the country. When the power loss in Nagaland, as per the official figures, is almost double the national average, it only calls for serious probe on why this abnormal figure continues to plague power supply and most interestingly, even accepted as fait accompli for many years till now. Inefficiency cannot be allowed to get away under the guise of ‘transmission loss’, when consumers are handed contestable bills owing to improper metering or inefficiency. If the real culprits responsible for power losses are not identified, then even additional power generation in future with thermal power will end up in a similar manner. The accumulated total loss from all these has been pegged at around 55% to 60% which is equivalent to 30MW to 40MW out of the total power that the state receives. Shortage of power totally defeats the very concept of economic development since business without power means powerless business. Expensive and sensitive equipments are damaged due to power fluctuations; causing huge losses to business, especially storage and small units that are wholly dependent on power supply. There are several options for improvement of the power sector such as construction of viable hydro power projects, thermal power from coal and modern solar power projects. In all these, the issue of land acquisition turns out to a great hindrance over demand for compensation and other “rights”. The state needs to first clean up its own backyard on the issue of so-called power losses, revenue shortfalls and efficiency otherwise it will be like putting the cart before the horse, all over again.<\/p>\n
Summertime blues<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}