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
