Spl police station to be set up in each district in UP to prevent power theft

The cities which will have more special police stations include Kanpur, Agra and Lucknow. These as well as police stations in other districts will have dedicated vigilance squads which will handle the power pilferage cases. Each special station will be provided a power engineer to take care of the technical issues.

The same kind of arrangement has been made in Gujarat and this experiment may improve the power availability in this state too.

The government had to take some hard measures as the transmission losses had reached an alarming proportion--32 per cent against the Central Electricity Authority recommendation of 15 per cent. Power theft by using Katia or hook has been a major contributing factor.

The state normally requires 16,500 Megawatt of power each day which goes up to 17,000 on special occasions. The state generates adequate power to meet a major part of this demand and meets the shortfall by purchasing power from the central pool. Still. some areas go dark because of unauthorised connections which have not been taken into account by assessing the requirement.

There are about 1.84 lakh households in the state which have to be provided power. Most of them have got connection and the remaining houses are likely to be covered by the end of next year. The government has proposed to make available 24-hour power supply to cities and 20 -hour to villages by the end of this period.

It hopes to achieve the target with the help of new measures which it has taken. Initially, it had proposed to set up only 11 special police stations but now it has decided to extend the scheme to all the districts because of additional help promised by the Centre.

It has an additional and more ambitious proposal-- to supply power through underground cables and get rid of electric poles in cities. A two-year time-frame has been prepared to fulfill the ambition.