Large parts of the national capital today continued to face long outages in sweltering heat with mercury remaining above 45 degree Celsius even as Delhi government exuded confidence of improvement in the situation by tomorrow.
There has been loadshedding ranging from one to five hours in several areas of East, West and South Delhi as a number of major power transmission lines are yet to be fully restored after they were damaged by a storm 10 days ago.
Power department officials said the situation is likely to improve by tomorrow as the Centre has drawn up an action plan to make available 400 megawatts of additional power.
They said Delhi Transco Ltd, a Delhi government entity responsible for maintenance of major transmission lines, has partly repaired the 220 Kilo Vault Bawana-Rohini line which will result in improvement of power supply to areas in West and East Delhi by tonight.
The officials said a number of transmission lines and towers maintained by Power Grid Corporation are yet to be restored.
Maintaing that there was no shortage of power in Delhi, they said outages are taking place because of snag in transmission network.
Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal had a two-and-half hour meeting with Delhi Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung and senior executives of Delhi Transco, Power Grid Corporation and power utilities. Goyal promised all required help to Delhi from the Centre to restore normal power supply.
The Centre has also ordered GAIL to provide extra natural gas to power plants in the national capital.
Acute scarcity of water was also reported from various areas of the city following the power crisis.
Meanwhile, the power crisis triggered a blamegame with Congress and Aam Aadmi Party attacking ruling BJP at the Centre for the crisis while the saffron party held the 15-year Sheila Dikshit dispensation responsible for the situation.
Congress came down hard on BJP, saying the government at the Centre cannot escape responsibility of ensuring power supply to Delhi as the city was under central rule.
