The Jharkhand government has instructed the energy department to ensure uninterrupted power supply across the State and categorically directed the department that oxygen plants and hospitals must get a smooth supply of the power.

The direction has been given in the wake of a number of incidents across the country where sudden disruption of power supply at hospitals threatened life of patients and production of oxygen was also disrupted.

Three days back the frequent power cut in the Gumla Sadar Hospital threatened the life of patients as oxygen supply got disrupted.

Even the union ministry of power on March 12 had issued a directive to all State governments to ensure power supply to medical installations on priority basis. The union ministry directed the energy secretary and managing directors of power   DISCOMs to personally monitor the power supply situation.

The Managing Director of Jharkhand Bijli Vitran Nigam Limited (JBVNL), Avinash Kumar held a marathon meeting with officials of JBVNL and ancillary units on Thursday in this regard.

Kumar said that the energy department has to play a major role in the fight against Covid 19 by ensuring that medical installations, civilians and others get uninterrupted power supply.

He said that engineers will have to ensure that oxygen refill and production units get sufficient power as these are the essential services. In fact, a special control has been set-up for real time monitoring of power supply at medical colleges, Sadar hospitals, Covid care centres, private hospitals, nursing homes, intensive care units and oxygen generation plants. The control room functions round the clock, where staff and engineers send real-time updates of power supply to the headquarters. 

Officials of all power distribution circles of Jharkhand were asked to prominently circulate contact numbers of control rooms so that people can inform about power cuts.

In the meeting the decision was taken to purchase 40 power transformers as the back-up during emergency period. 20 transformers of five MBA capacity and another 20 transformers of 10 MBA capacity will be purchased.

Kumar said that engineers and officials of the department will have to ensure that there is no power cut and if there is any power cut due to technical snags the same is repaired quickly.

On Thursday evening a large part of Ranchi witnessed a power cut due to fault in Hatia-Argora supply line. The fault could be corrected around 8 pm.