Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions

Lights, camera, action power cut
Posted: 538 GMT

CHENNAI, India This was by far one of the most difficult pieces that we have put together.
Caught short: Power supplies in Chennai are causing problems for companies.
Caught short: Power supplies in Chennai are causing problems for companies.

For starters, it seemed like a simple task. Chennai, India s fourth largest city located in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, has been facing a shortage of power for quite some time now.

Yet this bustling city has seen an overflow of investors making a beeline to set up manufacturing units. With companies like Ford, Chevrolet, Hyundai and many more automotive industries setting up shop in this city, it s no surprise that this place has often been called the Detroit of India. The big question for us was how do these businesses manage to get by with constant power shortage?

Our interest in power shortage was triggered when our Chennai-based correspondent Liz Neisloss was shown a letter addressed to one of the major car companies by the electricity board early last year.
It stated that companies would have to shut down on an assigned weekday in order to tide over the situation on the temporary shortage of power availability .

Liz also noticed that fathers were dropping kids to school because they were off from work due to power holidays.

What started as a relatively simple story to do turned into quite a challenge! Liz and I called over a dozen big businesses to try and get them to talk to us on camera about the power situation. Some gave us an emphatic no while others came up with a polite excuse. All this after they admitted that power shortage was a problem. It might seem a little wary but it is understood that the electricity board of Chennai is not going to be too happy to hear businesses complain about power cuts.

One of the small scale business managers for an auto parts industry said that one way to function with power cuts is to operate on a 24-hour shift. So when the power goes down, all is quite and you resume work only after the power is back up again. We were told that sometimes businesses are informed beforehand when power cuts are likely to happen.

After much searching we did manage to get a business owner to tell us how he functions with power cuts.

Planning on sitting on a car battery for 24/7?

Yep ! with those two Dynamos empowering !

TAF blowing up 90% of out National power?

Yep.. Entire Kelani Bridge was out of power for 3 hours :)