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Journalism of Courage
THE POWER outage in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad on Wednesday, which caught most of the small and medium-scale industries unawares, may have resulted in losses worth Rs 300-400 crore. Sandeep Belsare, president of the Small Scale Industries Association of Pimpri-Chinchwad, said it took almost eight hours for power supply to be restored in all parts of the industrial areas and thus resulted in an entire day’s loss of production at many units.
“The total financial loss to these units is estimated to be in the range of Rs 300-400 crore,” he said.
In the industrial belt of Pimpri-Chinchwad, the outage started at 6 am and continued till 11 am. Belsare said nearly 50 per cent of the industrial area got back its supply by 11 am but other areas had to wait till evening to get back their supply. “Only 10 per cent of the 11,000 small and micro-scale industries have diesel generators. Also, given the high cost of diesel, it is not feasible,” he said.
Belsare said this was the most severe outage the area had seen in the recent past. “Individual areas have had outages but this would be the first time the whole area faced the outage,” he said.
Due to the outage, almost all units have faced severe production loss, with Belsare estimating around Rs 300-400 crore loss to the sector. “This will include salary, standing expenses, loss of production and fines slapped by bigger companies for non-compliance of deadline,” he said.
In order to compensate for this loss, the industries have asked electricity distribution companies to ensure power is supplied to the units on Thursday, which is otherwise a maintenance day. “We will not take the weekly off on Thursday to compensate for the loss in production,” said Belsare. The power outage impacted other businesses in the city as well. Those with back-up like the bakery at Felice Pasticceria in Kothrud could continue their normal routine, thanks to a 65-KW diesel generator that worked for four hours.
“Because of the generator, our batches did not go to waste. In baking, if there is no electricity even for a couple of minutes and the oven switches off, your whole batch is wasted. Even last week, there was a power failure on two days, for no apparent reason. The cost of running a diesel generator is huge and we have incurred a big financial loss,” said Prasad Kapre of Felice Pasticceria.
