The State, having topped in registering the highest number of consumers under the Urja Mitra scheme, has been unable unable to complete 100% registration owing to consumers’ unwillingness to share their mobile numbers.
The Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (Tangedco) had been involved in indexing of mobile numbers and mapping of distribution transformers for implementing the Outage Managing System.
Tangedco was finding it difficult as only 81% of the total consumers comprising domestic, huts, industries, agriculture and commercial supplies had been mapped with the concerned distribution network of the locality.
A senior official of Tangedco said of the 2.86 crore consumers in the State, the electricity utility had completed indexing of mobile numbers for 2.32 crore consumers. Similarly out of the 42.50 lakh consumers in the city, more than 32 lakh consumers have been mapped with the distribution network till January this year with around 6 lakh consumers data mapped and sent to the REC Transmission Project (RECTP) for uploading purposes.
The Urja Mitra scheme was part of the initiative of Ministry of Power to provide scheduled and unscheduled outages to electricity consumers through push notifications/Short Messaging Service (SMS) throughout the country.
The Urja Mitra was also available as an application on both Android and iOS platforms. One could also see the scheduled outages in the Urja Mitra website ( http://www.urjamitra.com/app/index.html ) by logging to the State, discom and circle. Another senior official of Tangedco said the central government sponsored the Urja Mitra project to bring in transparency in maintenance shutdowns and unscheduled power cuts to the consumers.
Under the project the Tangedco officials had compiled a list of the entire State’s electricity distribution network of substations, feeders numbering 7,065, and 2,35,396 transformers and fed in to the computer.
The electricity distribution network provided with codes was then linked with the unique consumer numbers which then would be linked to the mobile numbers for providing SMS notifications of scheduled power cuts in their locality if any.
Irregular flow of info
However consumers had a mixed bag of responses about information flow being irregular or not getting information of any sort at all. V. Rama Rao, a social activist in south Chennai, complained about not receiving any information of scheduled power cuts even after registering the mobile number along with consumer number in the register maintained at the electricity office in Nanganallur.
Even for those residents who had been regularly receiving SMS on the scheduled power cuts through ‘Umitra’ pointed out that either the information was received only a few minutes ahead or after the power cut had been carried out. The residents suggested the information about scheduled power cuts should be received at least three hours ahead.
