Power cuts part of routine maintenance, strict action against those spreading misinformation: Minister in Delhi Assembly

Sood, however, said the complaints were being posted by “fake accounts”.

“We will take strict action against such fake accounts and the people who support these accounts. We will take criminal action, not civil, against the culprits,” Sood said in the Delhi Assembly, responding to a Calling Attention Motion on the issue.

Sood said the outages were part of “routine maintenance” to make sure the city is prepared for the upcoming summer. “We are a 40-day-old government, yet they claim we have disrupted a system that was perfect for the last 10 years. There is no electricity crisis,” he said, claiming that the power cuts were routine and happen every year during this time.

He also alleged that Leader of Opposition Atishi was spreading “false narratives” on social media using fake accounts and bots. “The Opposition is trying to create disorder in the city through misinformation,” he said.

“Over the past 10 years, there were 2.72 lakh power cuts in Delhi lasting over an hour, averaging 75 times a day. No one can refute this data,” he added.

Atishi, in a video address, called the minister’s assertions a lie.

“The first lie Ashish Sood told was that under the AAP government led by Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi did not have a 24-hour electricity supply. I would like to show Ashish Sood the data presented in the Rajya Sabha on February 3, 2025, by the Union Power Minister… they confirm that Delhi had round-the-clock electricity,” she said.

She also said that contrary to Sood’s claims, the power cuts were not scheduled. “I challenge him to prove that even one of them was a scheduled cut,” she said, citing figures from the Delhi government’s State Load Dispatch Center (SLDC) website.

Further, she described as false the allegations that fake accounts were posting about power cuts on social media. Naming some people who had posted about the same on X, she pointed to their posts from the past few months.

She maintained that many of these people had abused AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal earlier and celebrated BJP’s win in the recent elections.

Earlier in the day, AAP MLAs Kuldeep Kumar and Sanjeev Jha submitted notices to the Delhi Assembly secretary, requesting a discussion on the power cuts affecting several areas in the city.