Load-shedding up to 6 hours in different areas of capital

Syed Shemul Parvez “
The severe trend of load-shedding has been intensified in various areas of the capital recently. It is learnt that there is load-shedding from one to six hours in a day. Inhabitants of the capital are fed up with this unplanned load-shedding. Especially children, students, patients and businessmen are facing more problems.
According to the sources of the officials of the electricity department, from July to September this year, maximum load-shedding of 2,000 to 2,200 MW has been done. Now it has increased up to 3 thousand MW. Which is highest in last 3 months.
Officials of Dhaka Power Distribution Company (DPDC) and Dhaka Electric Supply Company (DESCO) said that such a situation has not happened in the last three months. The situation has been going very bad for some time.
Load-shedding has to be done five to six times somewhere.
Meanwhile, students are mostly affected during the daytime as they cannot sleep at night because of load-shedding. Students are not able to concentrate in studies. They can’t even go to school on time. Traders say that they are suffering a lot due to excessive load-shedding.
Minto Miah, a local trader of plastic factory in old Dhaka told the New Nation that due to frequent load-shedding, we cannot run our business properly.
As a result our net production has gone down and it is becoming tough to pay the salary of my staff, Minto added.
Apart from this, the condition of newborns and patients is also the same. They have been suffering due to regular load-shedding.
State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nasrul Hamid has said that there is no hope of improvement in the load-shedding situation before November. He said, some power plants have to be shut down at daytime due to load. And those that are running during the day are closed at night. That is why the area of load shedding has become a little bigger. Hopefully, the situation will be normal from November.
The load-shedding circumstances worsened after the major blackout caused by the National grid failure last week, and now some power outages are happening just when people prepare to go for sleeping.
According to last week’s load-shedding schedule, at least 42 areas in the city saw outages in the midnight.
The areas include Golapbagh, Postogola, Dhanmondi, Gendaria, Jurain, Demra, Moghbazar, Malibagh, Khilgaon, Ring Road, Elephant Road, Katabon, Green Road, Kalabagan, Bangla Motor, New Market, Sobhanbagh, and Niketan.
At least half of these areas saw power outages between 1:00am and 2:00am. In the previous months, these schedules did not include any outages after midnight.
According to DPDC and the DESCO officials, there was a shortage of around 800MW in Dhaka on Monday and they had to manage it by implementing area-wise load-shedding of four to six hours.
DPDC Managing Director Bikash Dewan told the media that they faced daily shortages of around 400-500MW over the last week, up from 300-400MW in the previous week.
“We are placing the demand but not getting the supply. They [PDB] are changing the power allocation several times a day, which affects distribution,” he said.
It should be noted that on July 18, the government announced the decision of area-based load-shedding to deal with the electricity crisis in the country. Load-shedding started across the country on July 19.