GURUGRAM: Around 400 families of Raheja Navodaya, a housing society in Sector 92, faced outage for more than 17 hours since Monday evening.
According to the residents, power supply to the housing society went off around 7pm on Monday and could be restored only by 12.30pm on Tuesday. Officials said there was a technical fault in the transmission line, which needed time to be rectified. The residents, however, alleged that discom officials started repairing the fault the next morning itself.
The society, the residents pointed out, does not have a permanent connection and power is supplied through a shared feeder line from Hayatpur village. The uneven load, they said, leads to frequent tripping, voltage fluctuation and long outages.
The flat owners said they had repeatedly lodged complaints with the developer as well as the discom, DHBVN, but to no avail.
“When we informed the discom officials about the power cut on Monday evening, they said they did not have enough manpower and resources to tackle the problem then. The repair work started around 10 the next morning and electricity was restored two and a half hours later. This is despite the fact that the discom is levying fixed charges on us apart from user charges,” a resident said.
According to the flat owners at Raheja Navodaya, power cuts happen for around 2-3 hours daily, prompting them to rely heavily on diesel gensets. The use of gensets not only has an effect on the environment, but also forces the housing society to spend Rs 2-3 lakh on fuel and maintenance of the machines every month.
The outages, the residents said, have been posing problems for students attending online classes and those working from home. “When people are working from home, uninterrupted power is a must. Using DG sets for hours at a stretch not only has an effect on the environment but also burns a hole in our pocket. However, since the DG set installed by the developer is not equipped to take the load of all the flats, we have to take gensets on rent during the summer. Of the 666 flats in total, around 400 are occupied,” said an RWA member.
But outages are nothing new for residents of the society. “It is an issue we are facing since 2017. The society only has a temporary connection of 11kV from a shared feeder. This leads to frequent tripping, outages and voltage fluctuations. Till now, the developer has not set up the 33kV electric infrastructure that he is supposed to. This is despite multiple requests from us,”said Dheeraj Sharma, the RWA vice-president of the society.
Despite repeated attempts, a representative of the developer remained unavailable for comment.
Told about the 17-hour-long outage, Joginder Kaushik, the SDO of Farrukhnagar, said, “An electricity pole got uprooted on Monday. We could rectify the problem only the next morning. The connection to the society is a temporary one and we have also asked the developer to set up the 33 kV infrastructure. But there has been no response from the builder. There are bills pending too.”
