Anantnag: While the general public continues to reel under frequent power cuts, work on a 10 Mega Volt Ampere (MVA) receiving station here in Pampore town is still incomplete even after three years.
The receiving station was sanctioned under the Prime Minister’s Development Package (PMDP), its location chosen behind the LPG filling station in Litterbal area of Pampore.
The work is being executed by a New Delhi-based firm, Krishna Electric Industries (KEI).
Soon after its sanctioning, the KEI started work on the project but objections were raised by the Municipal Committee Pampore, which claimed the piece of land as its own, sources in the Power Development Department (PDD) said.
“To begin with, they objected to giving away the land, and then they wanted compensation for some fencing they had managed to construct around the land,” the sources said, adding that it took the authorities more than a year to sort out the differences between the two departments.
The sources said that the civil society in Pampore played an active and crucial role in getting the departments to resolve their differences and bring them on the same page.
The work was started again in the summer of 2019 but was put to halt after August 5, when Kashmir was put under complete lockdown following the abrogation of Article 370. The COVID-19 lockdown that followed this year kept the work suspended.
“We hoped that the project would bring some respite to the heavy curtailment of power supply we have been facing for years now. Things, however, look bleak and it might be another year before the project is actually up and running,” a local resident lamented.
Kashmir Reader talked to the Executive Engineer of PDD for Awantipora, Altaf Hussain Shah, who maintained that despite all the hindrances, more than 70 percent of the work had already been carried out on the project.
“It has a deadline of March 2021 and I am hopeful that it will be completed by then. The transformer has been installed and it will be connected soon,” Shah said, adding that the Chief Engineer also took stock of the work recently and the progress has been satisfactory.

Suhail A Shah