Consumer groups allege unofficial load-shedding
Officials of MSEDCL attribute power cuts to the pre-monsoon maintenance, point to transformer issues
HT Correspondent
MUMBAI: Although the Maharashtra government claims the state is free from distress loadshedding despite the coal crisis and the soaring demand for electricity due to the rising heat, consumer groups allege it is resorting to covert power cuts without announcing them officially. However, the allegation has been refuted by the stateowned power distribution utility.
“Instead of a planned loadshedding, they are enforcing it in a disguised manner… this is often passed as power cuts undertaken due to breakdowns and maintenance,” Pratap Hogade of Maharashtra Rajya Veej Grahak Sanghatana said. He said the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (MSEDCL) was shedding around half an hour to an hour of load across the state to make up for the gap between demand and supply.
Hogade claimed power supply to agricultural consumers was curtailed by two hours. Farmers got eight hours of electricity during the day or 10 hours at night, he said. Similarly, the domestic, agricultural, and commercial consumers on around 3,000 of the 24,000 feeders, which get single-phase electricity supply, also had to face power cuts, Hogade added.
Ashish Tiwari, a former media professional and resident of Badlapur East, said apart from the scheduled power cuts for maintenance purposes, they had to face unscheduled loadshedding. “This happens regularly; the frequency of power cuts is very high… the quality of power supply is bad,” he said.
However, this was refuted by a senior MSEDCL officer, who attributed the power cuts to weather and maintenance. “We have to undertake planned shutdowns for pre-monsoon maintenance. Some of our equipment and lines are old and are hence impacted by the heat leading to breakdowns and tripping. We are replacing such lines in a phased manner.”
Vijay Singhal, managing director, MSEDCL, too denied this claim. “There is no official or unofficial load-shedding. We have [adequate] power. In fact, we have surplus power. There might be local issues regarding transformers etc.”
The latest National Family Health Survey-5 presents some sobering data on the health of India’s youngest. Eighty nine percent of children between six to 23 months (less than two years of age) do not receive a “minimum acceptable diet.” In Maharashtra, the proportion is higher; only 8.9% of this age group receives an adequate diet. Last year’s NFHS data for Mumbai suburban showed that 7.2% of children under the age of five are severely wasted (weight to height ratio) 18% are wasted, and 24.6% are underweight.
Since 2019, we have worked wi t h the Foundation for Mother and Child Health (FMCH), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that works with the urban poor in Mumbai and its suburbs, supporting over 50,000 beneficiaries. Field workers are trained to conduct door-to-door visits to provide the support that pregnant women, lactating mothers and children up to two years would need to cut out malnutrition.
Our foundation’s thrust is to build the capacity of NGOS. In this instance, we found the biggest support we could offer FMCH was to help build them a digital platform.
In each home visit, NGO teams need to share relevant health content (for instance, good practices for nutrition of mother and child, guidelines for breast-feeding, vaccination schedules), as well as conduct anthropometry — measure the height and weight of the child; the most important indicator of malnutrition — at specific intervals. So where does technology come into the picture?
Over rounds of discussions with the NGO we helped create Nutree, a mobile application for the Android platform. The Nutree platform allows field workers to register beneficiaries and also record visits. We launched the first phase in 2020 across communities in Bhiwandi, Kurla and at Wadia Hospital and for starters, included a comprehensive decision tree for each type of visit that guided the field worker on the type of questions to be asked, and also provided visual content like pictures and videos to help explain concepts better. For i nstance, a pregnant woman is asked if she has gone for her ante-natal check-up (ANC). If she has, she is asked to furnish more details – how many visits are over, when she went etc. If she hasn’t gone for any check-up, she is counselled on its importance and given crucial information on where she could go.
In the second phase, launched last year, the app included decision trees for children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and moderate acute malnutrition ( MAM) after FMCH realised that they didn’t have a standardised protocol for visiting and managing such cases which was lowering t h e i mpa c t o f t h e i r p r o - grammes. Accordingly, they defined a protocol which ensured consistency across field workers and higher quality of care: They standardised once-a-week visits for SAM cases and fortnightly visits for MAM cases, with detailed questions for each visit. Almost immediately, within 3-5 weeks, they were able to record improvements in the health of beneficiaries.
This phase also included a module for field workers to schedule their day: each person now had a list of visits due, by date and location, as well as overdue visits. Data after just four months of usage showed that the percentage of high-risk mothers who missed visits went down from 58% to 37%, pregnant mothers who missed anthropometry visits went down from 40% to 20% and children who missed anthropometry visits each went down from 30% to 14%. FMCH found that the app allowed a field officer to handle 100 more families on average– a 50% increase in their productivity.
The government’s anganwadi system takes care of the health and nutrition of pregnant women, lactating mothers, and children from zero to five years in addition to several other aspects of health and education. While the system itself is vital to the long-term well-being of the community, the current set up has gaps, like insufficient leadership and inadequate training for workers to counsel mothers.
Implementing the right technology, we found, not only improved the field worker’s efficiency by taking a load off of their backs, but also ensured consistency and accountability as the NGO leaders could monitor what’s happening on ground. While adoption of technology cannot solve all problems, it clearly provides tools to equip our community workers and enables them to become more effective in resolving widespread malnutrition.