Sopei Joel Rungsung
After 3 days of travelling by train, including 9 hours of waiting at Guwahati railway station, I finally reached Dimapur, tired but excited to be home. My brother-in-law had come to pick me up from the railway station and as we made our way back home, we engaged in some chit-chat. We soon reached home. My brother and sister and our family help, carrying a lit LED lamp, was waiting to greet me. The power cut had started even before I had reached home. I had known that there would be power outages but they told me that the power condition was really bad. It’s not that electricity never goes off in Hyderabad, where I have been staying for the past 3½ years, but then it barely ever goes and even if it does, they follow a strict schedule. In the case of unscheduled power-cuts, it is always restored in 5-10 minutes. My brother-in-law had purchased a generator the same day I arrived to help ease the trouble of power outages. My brother who was to leave for Bangalore in a few days told me, ‘it is going to be your duty to switch on/off the generator’ and so I learned how to operate a generator.
Newspapers reported that two major electrical towers collapsed in Alipurduar (Eastern West Bengal) on the 400-KV Binnaguri (West Bengal)-Bongaigaon (Western Assam) double circuits due to a heavy storm and squalls on May 3, thereby hitting electricity supply to the entire Northeast leading to the power cuts. Electricity, which many of us have become so comfortable with, became a nuisance because of the frequent outages. For me, the power situation became a pain in the butt as I had to run to the generator every time there was a power cut and every time power was restored, and I did not want to be running up and down every half an hour or so. For two nights I struggled to sleep because of the heat and the mosquitoes.
‘What is the Government doing to improve the power condition - both the Central and the State Government?’ an editor of a newspaper asks, and adds that it has been over 60 years since independence but the power condition has seen very little improvement in the past decade in the Northeast. The Government has been spending crores of Rupees into various Hydro-electric projects in the past decades but many of them, especially here in Nagaland, for reasons unknown are still light years away from becoming operational.
Thanks to the power department for the frequent power cuts, the already hot and unbearably humid Dimapur, was made increasingly unbearable. My homecoming has resulted in a lot of curses directed towards the power department. The brief rainfall did help reduce the heat but more rain would mean more power cuts, and with monsoon approaching, though there will be a welcome decrease in temperature, get ready for more power cuts.
(The writer is pursuing MA in Communication from University of Hyderabad)
