Safety of lives, property is top priority, says GESCOM MD

‘Company is going to take up a number of safety measures’

Responding to concerns over accidents leading to loss of human life, Rahul Pandve, Managing Director of Gulbarga Electricity Company (GESCOM) said that he had a number of safety projects in the pipeline to ensure the safety of people and public property.

“Safety is our top priority. We are taking up a number of initiatives to ensure the safety of human life and public property. Replacing open live electric wires with insulated pipes and wires, iron electric poles with cement ones. We are identifying the hazardous locations to implement the safety measures,” Mr. Pandve said during his interaction with presspersons at his office in Kalaburagi on Saturday.

The GESCOM has, he added, identified 2,088 hazardous locations across its area of operation in the seven districts of the Kalyana Karnataka and sensitive places like schools, hostels and hospitals will be prioritised in the implementation of safety measures.

To a question on the damage inflicted to GESCOM property in the recent floods, Mr. Pandve said that the damage was minimised owing to the proper coordination between the the Department of Water Resources and GESCOM.

“We got authentic information about the time and the amount of water being released from the reservoirs. This enabled us to assess the areas that would be flooded and the extent of flooding. We shifted the transformers from flood-prone areas before the floods. That is how we protected the GESCOM properties. Yet, 104 electric poles, 23 transformers, and 7.3 km of electric lines were damaged and we have replaced them all,” Mr. Pandve said.

Mr. Pandve said that GESCOM had introduced the Discounted Energy Charges Scheme as per the Karnataka Electricity Regulatory Commission order for encouraging High Tension (HT) consumers to increase its sales and resultant revenues.

“The idea is to encourage HT consumers to use more power over and above their normal consumption. The excess energy consumed over and above the normal usage would be charged at ₹6 a unit against the normal charges of ₹7.15 a unit,” Mr. Pandve said adding that 21 HT consumers had already applied for the scheme.

Director (Technical) Laxman Chavan, Superintendent Engineers Sidram Patil and Heera Singh, Executive Engineer Ramesh Pawar, Deputy Controller of Accounts Santosh Hibare and other senior officers were present.

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