Chandigarh, May 3
The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today said the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was directly responsible for the prolonged power cuts being faced by the people across the State as it had failed to either generate additional power nor upgraded the transmission system.
In a statement here, senior SAD leader Parambans Singh Romana also accused power minister Sanjeev Arora of lying that the State had adequate power at it’s disposal while asserting that the AAP government was now desperately trying to purchase power at Rs 15 per unit to make good the extreme shortfall. “Ironically both the Congress and AAP castigated the SAD for doing power purchase agreements at the rate of Rs 2.86 per unit”, he asserted.
Romana said the truth was that both the previous Congress as well as the present AAP government had failed Punjabis. He said both parties were responsible for making a power surplus State into a power deficient one by failing to augment generation capacity. “Not one single mega watt of power generation was added by both the party governments”, he added.
The SAD leader said before the SAD took over the reins of the State in 2007 Punjab was reeling under power cuts for the agriculture, domestic and industrial sectors. He said it was the determination of Mr Sukhbir Singh Badal which turned the tables and made Punjab power surplus. “The SAD led government was able to add 8,000 mega watts of power in ten years to take the generation capacity from 6,000 mw to 13,961 mw. Since the consumption increases by five to six per cent, Punjab had 3000 mw additional power capacity at the end of the SAD government’s tenure”, he asserted.
Romana said while the SAD government ended the era of generator sets and ensured adequate power to all sectors, the next 9.5 years from 2017 witnessed consumption increasing to the 18,000 mw presently. He said since both the Congress and AAP governments had failed to add a generation the State was crippled by power cuts.
Telling power minister to tell the facts as they were, Romana said the AAP government had also failed to upgrade the transmission system which was leading to frequent shut downs in power supply as the system had become over loaded. He said the SAD government had spent Rs 5,000 crore to upgrade the transmission system and had brought down transmission losses from 32 per cent to 17 per cent. He also disclosed how 200 new power grids had been added to the system by the SAD government and that after that in the last 9.5 years only 60 new grids had been added.
