Two brothers, Muniraju and Ravi Kumar, were cutting grass in their coconut farm for livestock in Dasenahalli village near Hesaraghatta on Sunday, when they came in contact with a live wire that had snapped because of the wind. They were both electrocuted.
Last month, loosely hanging electric wires from an unattended electric pole left Muzaffar Sharif, 15, a resident of Shivajinagar, battling for life. The two brothers and the teenager were only a small part of the statistics.
Year-on-year, the number of electrical accidents reported under the limits of Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (Bescom) has surpassed 200, a majority of them “non-departmental”.
As many as 364 of these accidents between the financial years 2015-16 and 2017-18 have been fatal. This financial year, in April alone, there have been 11 fatal accidents.
Y.G. Muralidharan from the Karnataka Electricity Governance Network said electrical accidents may occur for a variety of reasons, primarily snapping of wires, loose sagging wires, poles uprooted during rains, and trees/branches falling on wires. “One needs to ask if the money allotted for safety in the tariff is being used to undertake precautionary measures such as replacement of old wires,” he said.
The matter of accountability too has been raked up by citizens. In the Hesaraghatta case, villagers resorted to a roadblock demanding justice for the brothers. But a Bescom official said compensation is paid only if the fault is of the power utility, such as in case of a wire snapping or transformer burst, and not if the incident occurred inside the house.
Muralidhar Rao, vice-president, Bangalore Apartments’ Federation, said there was no accountability as Bescom is a government concern. In an online petition to the previous government, he had argued for privatisation of power utilities. “The Escoms are hardly able to carry on their day-to-day maintenance work, leave aside matters like taking up expansion (to meet the exponentially growing demand), technology upgrade, and so on. The lack of proper maintenance is in turn leading to many accidents, some fatal, causing courts to order huge compensation payments, apart from suggesting removal of transformers and allied equipment from footpaths, all of which is going to be burdening the Escoms even more.”
‘Taking up measures’
On the other hand, Bescom claimed that measures for accident-prevention were being taken up. “Old transformers are being replaced. We have also started using covered conductors, a new technology, for overhead LT lines and some 200 km of lines have been identified for this, especially in densely populated pockets such as slums,” said Bescom Managing Director P. Rajendra Cholan.
He said the power utility was also implementing the ‘model sub-division’ project where all these measures will be implemented. Five subdivisions have been chosen for the project out of 48 are: S10 (Begur, Vijaya Bank Layout, Basavanapura), S13 (Electronics City, Singasandra, Chennakeshavanagar), N4 (Laggere, Chokkasandra, Hegganahalli), E8 (Banaswadi, RS Pallya, Babusapalya), and E3 (Halasuru, MG Road, Someshwara temple area).
Mr. Cholan also emphasised on the need for awareness to prevent accidents. “In at least 30% of the cases, we have observed that violation of building bylaws has led to accidents as the buildings are too close to HT lines. People even dry wet clothes on electricity lines. Our personnel too don’t follow safety protocol many a time,” he said.
