Information not power

BSES, which is one of the two private sector companies that supplies electricity to the capital has often been accused of being terribly inefficient. Last month, BSES areas suffered from a lot more power cuts than the Tata-owned NDPL ones and the chief minister had to pull up the distribution company — she accused it of not buying power in the market since the rates were quite high as the company didn’t want to dent its bottom line. The other complaint about BSES is that its call centres don’t even know if power supplies to an area have been affected or when this will be restored. So it was a surprise when, around midnight, BSES customers got an SMS saying that due to a problem with the government-owned transmission company, power supplies would remain irregular till the morning. The only thing was, the lights never went out that day in all the areas.