By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, April 29: Power Minister AT Mondal on Monday said the department has not gone for any load-shedding yet and efforts are on to ensure there is not any this year provided the rain gods are merciful.
“As of now, we have not gone for any load-shedding. We are working and as far as possible, we will not go for load-shedding,” he said.
“Our first target was to make sure all board exams pass off without any interruption. We are happy to say that we have done that. Secondly, we also wanted to see that there is no load-shedding during elections. We have been successful in that too,” he said.
“…our major source of electricity is hydel power and it all depends on rainfall. Like last year, rain is delayed this year. But we are hoping that it will occur in a couple of weeks. If that happens, hopefully, we will not go for any load-shedding,” Mondal said.
He said Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma wants that there is uninterrupted supply of power in the state. He said the department is working on that line.
On power outages experienced in various parts of Shillong, Mondal said power cuts can be for two reasons – load-shedding and shutdown which happens due to various reasons such as lightning strikes, snapped power lines, malfunctioning of transformer, trees falling onto live wires, repair of sub-station etc.
“Let’s try to work out and avoid load-shedding as far as possible. Around this time last year, we had power cuts for 7 hours in urban areas and 9 hours in rural areas. This year, we prepared from a long time back on how we will go with our supply and demand. We are still managing,” he added.