'Not 100%, only 90% of Capital city to have power by May 12'

Bhubaneswar: For power-harried City denizens, here is a distressing news. The Capital city is not going to witness a 100 per cent restoration of power supply by this weekend.

Virtually delivering a shock to denizens' hopes, Energy Secretary Hemant Sharma today said by the May 12 deadline, power supply will be restored to 90 per cent consumers in Bhubaneswar. In contrary, Information and Public Relation Secretary Sanjay Singh had on May 8 unambiguously stated that the Capital city will have 100 per cent power supply by May 12. He had also then indicated that power supply will be restored to 80 per cent of the Capital city by May 10.

When asked about whether 80 per cent of Capital city had power supply by now, Sharma parried the question but said the precise numbers will later be informed by I&PR secretary Sanjay Singh.

On reports of enraged city residents taking the law into hands and even detaining junior engineers of Cesu for delay in power supply restoration, a tense looking Sharma agreed to of receiving such instances of protest from some areas. But he downplayed the protests by saying as residents are aggrieved, such protests have come to fore and added that as people are watching our 24X7 tireless restoration work, we appeal them to appreciate and have little patience. Power supply will be made available to all.

However, Sharma is still non-committal on any specific date to restore complete power supply to the Puri district that bore the brunt of extremely severe cyclonic storm Fani. He maintained that over 4000 men are at work on ground for quick restoration of power supply in the district. More skilled and semi skilled workers from Kerala and Karnataka will join thousands of such work force from AP, WB and Telengana working here. We expect good outputs soon in Puri, he added.