Gandhinagar to turn on dark mode, celebrate ‘full moon’ on May 16

Gandhinagar Collector Kuldeep Arya, who held a meeting with top district officials in this regard on Friday, told The Indian Express: “Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Limited (GUVNL) has taken the initiative on the suggestion of Governor Acharya Devvrat to save electricity. The idea is to turn the lights off on roads of the city—barring the major ones—on the night of full moon to save energy. The Roads and
Building Department of the state government will carry out a survey in this regard.”

The ‘lights off’ will continue in Gandhinagar on every full moon night and will possibly be replicated in other parts of the state as well, said GUVNL Managing Director Jai Prakash Shivahare.

Collector Arya said the initiative is being juxtaposed with the popular concept of promoting the experience of watching night sky in full moon light and growing closer to the nature.

“…to save electricity, to cut pollution and to ensure that all—from children to senior citizens—can view the unique beauty of nature, the night under Moon Light programme has been organised in Gandhinagar…” an official release stated.

The district police administration will undertake continuous patrolling to ensure that no untoward incident happens during the three hours from 9 pm when street lights will be shut in the state capital.

The idea to turn off lights was suggested by Governor Devvrat during a meeting he held recently with top officials of the state government on the good practices to save energy, said Shivahare. “He (the governor) called the meeting with top officials because of the heat wave in the country amid peaking power consumption and the coal and fuel crises at the national level. Globally, there is a fuel crisis and the whole country is struggling with that even though Gujarat has good tie-ups (and has not faced any major power crisis so far). In such a situation, we should go for energy saving while adopting good practices,” Shivahare said.

With the early onset of summer, Gujarat saw the power demand peak to 20,000 MW last month against a generation capacity of about 37,000 MW. Recently, GUVNL decided to raise the fuel surcharge for the fourth time to ? 2.50 per unit from May 1.

The state is forced to buy expensive power from exchanges and private power producers. Non-functional power generation units or those with very low Plant Load Factor (PLF) are the major causes of electricity shortage in Gujarat. Expensive coal and high prices of natural gas have also contributed to the crisis. GUVNL officials said they cannot rely on the 16,000 MW of renewable capacity due to huge fluctuations in supply.

According to Shivahare, various suggestions came up for saving power during the meeting (with the Governor) and one of them was to cut power in Gandhinagar for three hours on full moon. The initiative was taken in the past by the then in-charge secretary of Gandhinagar (and current additional chief secretary—Finance) JP Gupta. It was decided to restart the same during the Governor’s meeting.

“There will be a token (electricity saving) in Gandhinagar but it will send out a good message. The Governor wanted Gujarat to take a lead in this,” said Shivahare.