The Tamil Nadu Electricity Board forced to increase the duration of the powercuts

Electricity demand touching 11,500MW and generation remaining at 7,500 MW, the state is reeling under acute power shortage, prompting the government to resort to long hours of unscheduled power cuts. The Tamil Nadu Electricity Board (TNEB) has been forced to increase the duration of the power cuts in the state barring Chennai. 

Most of the districts face outages lasting over six hours. In Madurai and surrounding areas, the residents are in a fix as the public exams are round the corner. With arrival of summer, unscheduled power cuts are bound to increase. "From 6 am to 9 pm, we face power cuts at regular intervals that last for at least two hours," said Elizabeth Rani, a mother of two school going children from Sadasiva Nagar near Anna Nagar. Of this, only two hours of power cuts are scheduled. 

In rural Madurai, the situation is even worse as unscheduled power cuts prolong for several hours and gone on into late into the night. "We don't know how our children are going to prepare for the exams," said Manimekalai, a resident of Nagamalai Pudukottai in the outskirts of Madurai. 

Similar is the condition in Coimbatore and surrounding areas which faces more than six hours power cuts every day. Nearly 150 industrial workers were arrested on Thursday, when they tried to picket two places on the busy Avanashi Road to mark their protest against power cuts, ranging from five to eight hours. 

The city has over 40,000 micro, small, medium and large engineering industries, foundries and textile mills, which are suffering production losses up to Rs 200 crore a day. "We are not able to do business as there is no power," said an industry association representative. 

TNEB officials state that they are helpless and cashless. "The demand has gone up drastically, but there has not been any capacity addition. We are not able to buy power as it is being sold at high prices and we do not have money to buy it too," said a source. The private power producers have reduced supply as the TNEB owes them over Rs 10,000 crore. "Many of our generation projects were delayed. We were supposed to get 1,000 MW from Vallur and 600 MW from North Chennai by November 2011, but it will happen by June this year," said the official.