Living through a crisis

THE power cuts that run up to 16 hours a day in villages, towns and cities of Tamil Nadu have dealt a heavy blow to industrial and agricultural production. It has affected every conceivable industrial activity: powerlooms; textile mills; foundries; welding sheds; electroplating units; and factories manufacturing wet grinders, pump sets, mixies, automobile components, and aluminium, brass and stainless steel utensils. Particularly affected are industrial/textile hubs such as Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Karur and Erode, and powerloom centres such as Palliapalayam, Kollampatti and Komarapalayam.

The consequences of the power cuts have been devastating, said M. Ramdas, former president of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Consumers Association, Coimbatore. Everybody has been affected, from machine shops to big, organised industries. He estimated the daily loss of production in Coimbatore district from a 12-hour power cut to be Rs.200 crore for an eight-hour shift.

Tamil Nadu, which requires 12,000 MW, faces a power shortage of 30 to 40 per cent. High tension (HT) industries were the worst affected, Ramdas said, because they had been prohibited from operating during peak hours, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. This is in addition to the power cut of about 12 hours a day.

Equally hurt are continuous process industries such as foundries, yarn mills and textile mills, which are forced to use diesel generators because their electricity requirement is high. A few industrialists who used generators to meet their export targets incurred huge costs, said Ramdas, who is the managing director of Mahendra Pumps Private Limited.

While the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (TANGEDCO) charges Rs.6 a unit from HT consumers, it works out to about Rs.15 a unit for diesel-generated electricity. To that extent, the cost of power is severely denting profitability, he said.

Unannounced cuts

What angers consumers like G. Ayyanar, a farmer from Onampakkam, near Cheyyur in Kancheepuram district, or R. Raja Chidambaram, secretary, Tamilaga Vivasayigal Sangam, is that power cuts for the day are not announced in advance. This prevents them from scheduling their industrial or agricultural operations.

Power supply is erratic; it is made at different times on different days. So we are not able to run our irrigation pump sets continuously. Before the water can reach the tail-end areas, power supply will be cut, said Raja Chidambaram.

None of the hosiery units in Tiruppur is able to meet all its export orders. A number of them have moved to Ahmedabad, Kolkata or Kanpur, in other States. Foundries from Coimbatore are shifting to Kolhapur or Belgaum. We cannot move out easily. But our customers will move out. They can source their components from Belgaum or Kolhapur, Ramdas said.

J. James, Coimbatore district president of the Tamil Nadu Association of Cottage and Tiny Industries Entrepreneurs, said power cuts in Coimbatore district had led to a drop in the turnover of 30,000 cottage industries from Rs.30 crore to Rs. 2 crore a day. We are unable to repay our loans. Banks have served notices on us and they are threatening to confiscate our machinery, said James.

Half of the cottage industries would have borrowed from moneylenders at an interest of 35 per cent. All micro units are struggling for survival, James said. In his estimate, one lakh workers had lost their jobs in Coimbatore district alone because of the power cut. Many of them now sold idlis on the roadside or had become auto drivers or construction workers, he said.

There are also some 20,000 small and medium industries in Coimbatore district. The turnover from a single machine in a micro unit on a day before the power cut began was Rs.2,000. But we are not able to get a turnover of even Rs.300 a day, James said. And the wage to be given to a labourer for a day is just as much.

Workers agitated

On September 27, entrepreneurs and workers from the 30,000 cottage units laid siege to the TANGEDCO office in Coimbatore and 300 of them were taken into police custody. They are now planning a bigger agitation, demanding that multinational companies around Chennai too should be subjected to power cut. Chennai has only two hours of power cut. Cottage industries are treated as second-class citizens. The quantum of power cut should be uniform across the State for all industries, James said.

Onampakkam area is dependent on agriculture, with farmers growing paddy, maize and chillies. We are not able to irrigate the fields because of the power cut and we do not know when we will receive electricity or not. The crops have withered, said G. Ayyanar.

T.S. Subramanian