Just writing

It's a crazy world out there!

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Unelectrified villages or cities?

India has a large programme for electrification of un-electrified villages: Villages which are far flung and have not been put onto the electricity grid. There are about 85,000 of them all. The target of electrification programme is to electrify all of these villages by 2012. But I wonder where there is similar programme for powering the "un-electrified urban areas" through the grid.

Let me explain "un-electrified urban areas".

My office is in a swank DLF building in DLF Cyber City. And guess what, it has not been provided grid connection. It runs 24x7x365 on Diesel or Gas generators (especially for a lot of BPOs in this area). Imagine if there is cut in gas supply or diesel shortage or something like that. This nightmare actually became true when during the oil companies strike, the petrol pumps and oil depots went dry. The DLF areas were running on low diesel inventory. To conserve oil, half of the lifts were shut down, the lights in parking lots were switched off and so were lights in corridors and "the fancy lights" in offices. It could have got scarier the next day had it not been a Saturday. Over the weekend, the oil companies strike was called off and ...

Does government have some programme to electrify "un-electrified urban areas"?

Labels: , , , , ,