Glitches trigger 4-hour outages in rural areas of Marathwada

Hundreds of villages in Marathwada and north Maharashtra are facing energy shortages owing to technical problems faced by distribution companies.

Load shedding will hit the agriculture sector hard as power supply to pumps will be reduced to eight hours from 12 hours. This is likely to aggravate farmers’ problems in Marathwada.

The government said it would normalise power supply in the next few days.

Mahavitraran, a state-owned power distribution company, has imposed load shedding in thousands of villages in Marathawada, including Beed, Parbhani, Jalna, Latur and few districts in north Maharashtra.

It took the decision after power generation from its three units at Khaparkheda, Parli and Koradi shut down owing to technical faults. The units of two other private power generation companies with whom the government has a power purchase agreement were also closed because of the short supply of coal.

Outages by some government plants also added to the power shortage, taking it to 4000 MW in the past few days.

The added demand of about 2000 MW in the summer compared to the last year’s 16,500 MW was also one of the reasons for the shortfall.

“Comparing to the shortfall the imposed load shedding is just 1500 MW. The supply has been reduced in the villages where the distribution losses are high and the recovery is low Most of these villages are in parts of Marathwada and north Maharashtra,” said an officia from the energy department.

Load shedding is rare in Maharashtra as it is a power surplus state.