India's coal reserves are running out alarmingly. Even as the government assured of ample coal stocks across the country, reports suggest that half of India's coal plants have stocks that will not last beyond two days.
Power Minister R K Singh termed fears of blackouts “entirely misplaced” and said daily despatch of coal to power plants has exceeded consumption, indicating a shift to gradual building up of stocks.
However, some states are already facing a crunch in power supply and are resorting to blackouts.
Here is the list of states getting affected:
-Punjab: The state government has stated that three-hour power cuts will take place every day until October 13. Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi slammed the Centre for inadequate coal supply.
-Delhi: The national capital will be seeing intermittent power cuts, residents were informed. Delhi Chief Minister Kejriwal had urged PM Modi to get involved and solve the problem. Union Power Minister R K Singh said CM Kejriwal "should've spoken to me directly" about the issue and told L-G
Delhi Power Minister Satyendar Jain, on Monday took to Twitter to speak on the issue.
"There is coal shortage in most of the power plants. The stock is left for only 2-3 days. NTPC capped production capacity of its plants to 55 per cent. Earlier we used to get 4000 megawatts of electricity but now we are not getting even half of that", he said.
Delhi CM Kejriwal said, "the situation is critical and many CMs have written about it to the Central govt. We all are working together to improve the situation".
-Kerala: Kerala may have to resort to load-shedding as its coal stocks deplete. On Monday, ANI reported that CM Pinarayi Vijayan chaired a high-level meeting on the issue.
-Rajasthan: Rajasthan has hour-long daily power-cuts.
"There are a lot of unscheduled outages. We have almost never have power in the night," Vaishali Master, a 52-year living in Rajasthan told Reuters, adding that in the last 4 days alone she has faced about 12-14 hours of power outages.
-Tamil Nadu: The Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (Tangedco), which is carrying out maintenance work in Chennai, said that power will be suspended in parts of the city.
-Andhra Pradesh: In Andhra Pradesh, power stations have coal reserves that would last for just a day or two
-Bihar: The state is already heavily impacted by the power supply crunch.
"For the last several days, we haven't had power for 7-8 hours a day," Prashant Raj, an electronic store manager in the Madhubani district of Bihar was quoted telling Reuters.
Check out the latst DH videos: