Irked by the increase in power cut duration in the last couple of days, residents and small-scale entrepreneurs in Ganapathy and Ganapathy Maanagar staged a protest on Saturday morning. The Coimbatore City Police said that the flash protest on the busy Sathyamangalam Road affected traffic flow for close to half-an-hour.
K. Viswanathan, a member of the Coimbatore North Urban Committee of the Communist Party of India, said that they [residents and entrepreneurs] decided to take to the streets because in the last couple of days the increase in power cut duration had been unacceptable.
Small and medium enterprises in and around Ganapathy suffered the worst because the entrepreneurs and workers were unable to complete work in time. And in the process they lost customers. For example, plastic moulding industries were unable to maintain the right temperature to mould plastics.
Mr. Viswanathan along with the party’s area secretary V. Rajendran led the protest.
He said that the residents were also angered by the fact that other parts of the State did not reel as much under power cut as Coimbatore did. In Chennai, the power cut was for an hour and in Salem it was not more than a few hours. The Coimbatore City Police rushed to the spot to pacify the protestors.
The police moved them to the roadside to ensure the flow of traffic. By then, the officials from the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation reached the place. Mr. Viswanathan said that the officials tried to explain to them the situation, and promised to represent their grievances to the senior TANGEDCO officials. The protestors later dispersed.
