The Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM) gained repute amongst Bangaloreans for its fast response and its customer care centre’s accessibility. This has been made possible due to 153 teams of linemen and engineers who work on shifts to maintain a state of permanent readiness to deal with outages.
The situation in rural areas under BESCOM however tells a different story. Tales of 12 hour-long power outages are galore. Officials themselves admit that response to problems taking 12 hours are normal in rural areas. With nearly 6,000 villages under BESCOM’s jurisdiction, the matter is not to be taken lightly.
Keeping this in mind, BESCOM will now place an additional 150 teams in its rural jurisdiction in order to cut down the time taken to respond to calls to under 60 minutes. These teams will be on par with those operating in Bangalore city and will be able to respond to calls in an hour.
BESCOM MD P Manivannan said that the teams would be put into operation from March. “Farmers who use pump-sets face many problems with power cuts since the water drawn from the sets would have to be pumped again if the power stops midway. Response time will come down drastically once our teams start functioning,” he added.
This, coupled with other campaigns like the one to discourage the use of pumpsets between 6 and 9 pm, a vigilance drive to check for pilferage and power theft is expected to bring down power supply problems in rural areas under BESCOM.