From Our Correspondent
New Delhi: Senior Congress leader and economic expert Prof. Gourav Vallabh has said that Lack of governance and poor coordination is leading the country towards power breakdown. According to Prof. Vallabh there is an increasing gap between the demand and supply of power in the country and the government in power at the center is hardly doing anything to resolve the severe power scarcity.
Talking to the media on Friday the Congress leader said that currently “the demand of electricity in the energy exchange is 16,035 megawatt and the supply of electricity in these exchanges is only 2,304 megawatt”. Elaborating the inefficiency of the BJP-led Modi government at the centre Prof Vallabh said the non operation of 72,074 megawatt capacity plants have aggravated the power shortage and the government has not attended the issue till date. “They are not operating. If you ask, what the reason- they will say is, we are not having appropriate amount of coal.”
According to the congress leader the scarcity of coal is artificial since “the coal mines are having appropriate amount of coal, but, the Modi government is not able to provide a logistic support to transport the coal from the coal mines to the power generating stations, because they are saying- we are not having railway racks. See the excuses, and if you will ask further questions to Modi government, they will say- states are responsible.”
He further accused the Modi government for mismanagement of the power situation and said “I am damn sure that nobody is aware that who is the Coal Minister and who is the Power Minister of our country” The congress leader further quipped “both of them (ministers) might be sitting in a big hall in Shastri Bhavan, where there are two air conditioners running, one from the left side of Hon’ble Minister and one on the right side of Hon’ble Minister, because they don’t care and the situation right now is that, that 16 states of our country are having power cuts of ten hours per day and the reason is that 72,074 megawatt capacity power stations are not operating, because there is no coal.”
Pointing fingers at the Modi government for the severe power shortage Prof Vallabh said that out of 173 power plants in the country, 106 are having coal of 25 per cent or less than 25 per cent of the required stock they are supposed to maintain. “Why they are having only 25 per cent or less than 25 per cent of stock?”
He said that that everyday there was a demand of 22 lakh tone coal and the supply was just 16 lakh tone per day. “Why there is a severe mismatch of demand and supply of coal?”
Forecasting the severity of the situation in the coming weeks, thanks to the rise in temperature during the summer he said. “The summer is yet to set in and in the month of May we will be having a total demand of power as 2.2 lakh megawatts, how the Modi government is going to meet the increasing power demand in peak of summer?”