Jammu and Kashmir UT faces 30 days worth of power cuts in a year | Data Premium

J&K U.T. faces record electricity cuts of up to 18 hourrs/day, with KPDCL & JPDCL topping SAIDI & SAIFI charts. The situation has worsened in recent months, impacting per capita income and study/employment time of women.

Power outages have been a persistent issue in the Jammu and Kashmir U.T. with recent news reports indicating that the duration of these cuts is now extending to over 18 hours a day. The region is prone to power cuts; during the pandemic peak two years back, people had found it tough to operate oxygen cylinders due to many unscheduled outages. This time, too, the record electricity cuts have come during winter when minimum temperatures are plummeting.

In this issue, J&K is one of the handful of U.T.s/States facing hardships. While uninterrupted electricity across the year is still not realised in any of the Indian provinces, the U.T. stands out as an outlier topping both in number and duration of outages by a wide margin. SAIDI and SAIFI are two measures that can be used to compare the scale of power outages.

Also read | Kashmir’s 18-hour power cuts are ‘collective punishment’, says Opposition

SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) measures the hours of non-momentary electric interruptions, per year, experienced by an average customer.

Chart 1 | The chart plots SAIDI values of 50 power distribution companies across 29 States and U.T.s. for 2021-22. The two power distribution companies in J&K U.T. — KPDCL and JPDCL — are highlighted.

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These two companies top the SAIDI chart for that year. The KPDCL recorded 889 hours worth of interruptions per customer in 2021-22. In other words, about 37 days’ worth of power cuts. The JPDCL recorded 489 hours — close to 20 days.