Panaji: A day after State Power Minister Sudin Dhavalikar claimed that Goa do not have any power supply issues, Confederation of Indian Industries’ (CII) Goa Chapter has said that power shortages, outages, unplanned shut downs were affecting the industry in the state.
In a press note released here on Thursday, the CII Goa Chapter has recommended to Dhavalikar, several measures, that needs to be taken to ensure that the industry do not suffer due to the issues related to power supply.
Dhavalikar on Wednesday had told reporters that Goa don’t have issues of power shut downs like Andhra Pradesh and other states where industries were suffering. “In Andhra Pradesh, industries are not running even for five hours a day sometimes due to load-shedding. We are far better,” Dhavalikar had told reporters after reviewing the performance of Power department in presence of high ranking officials.
The CII has pointed out that in the past it had made several recommendations to the Government with regards to improvement of basic infrastructure for the industry that includes uninterrupted power supply as one of them.
The industry body has said “no progress has been made in this regards till date.”
“Fluctuation and variations on frequency and voltage and unplanned power shutdowns has led to Industry facing huge losses in terms of time and money due by outage/surge in currents causing damage of very expensive machinery, and raw material in the process based industries,” it added.
The CII has said that due to lack of proper basic infrastructure from the Power Department i.e lack of efficient uninterrupted power supply, Industry has been forced to depend on Gensets for its power supply.
“It should be understood that the use of gensets is not really an option as it is not economically viable and hugely affects the cost of production, apart from being unsustainable due to usage of fossil fuels,” it said.
The CII has suggested to the government that in the event of undertaking any maintenance, it may be done in a systematic, phased and planned manner, giving advance notices to prepare the industry to make alternate arrangements, as required.
“Secondly, there is also an Urgent need for stable and consistent power in order to protect the Expensive machinery and equipment,” it adds.
