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Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Frequent power cuts in Pune

Category: Personal

Electricity is playing hide and seek at home. There is this daily load shedding of three hours and now, on top of that for the last two days there have been so many intermittent power cuts. Go to work, there's no electricity at home, come home, again there's no electricity. wtf has happened to MSEB? Yesterday there was no electricity for almost seven hours. Today the lights kept on going off intermittently, as if they had been programmed to switch off for half an hour after every half an hour. 06:45 to 07:15 p.m., 7:45 to 08:15 p.m., 08:45 to 09:15 p.m. This is apart from the regular three hour load shedding that takes place in the afternoons.

Pune has gone to the dogs. Frequent power cuts, no traffic sense, roads under construction, street lights not working, pot-holed roads, pollution, traffic signals not on, no zebra crossings, bad roads, pedestrians walking haphazardly, painting and civic work during peak hours with barricades on roads; wtf is happening?

Hyderabad is a hundred times better than Pune. The density of traffic and traffic jams are worse, but it has the infrastructure, unlike Pune.

Pune needs flyovers and urban planning, not skybuses.
Because of the road under construction there's always a big traffic jam at the Kalyaninagar signal, with vehicles waiting to turn right. A simple solution is to keep a traffic policeman at the end of the broad concrete road at Shastrinagar, and allow vehicles to turn right (to Kalyaninagar) with the oncoming traffic (from Nagar road) stopped. Instead of that there's one big mess with everyone trying to turn right while the oncoming traffic doesn't stop.
All traffic problems are Usability issues.

It's a state of mind. I'm agitated and it comes across in my writing, and it's this power cut. Every half an hour there's a power cut. If this is the power situation in Pune, no one will outsource their work, however low-end it might be, to a city that cannot even offer uninterrupted power supply. Power cuts will impact SOHO. What will one work if one doesn't have a generator set, and there's no electricity for almost six hours (at least a minimum of three hours) a day for five days a week?

Are they saving power, or is this the way to compensate for free electricity offered in rural Maharashtra, as a part of votebank politics during the assembly election?

Related:
Read Jan Frey's article on flyovers in Bremen, Germany.