Jaipur: Frequent power failures in Jaipur have disrupted medical entrance examinations and raised concerns over the city’s unreliable electricity network, with Sunday’s NEET-PG test cancelled following a blackout, days after a similar disruption affected the Ayush PG entrance exam on Aug 23.While discom officials attributed the failures to problems with internal systems at examination centres, residents in Ganesh Nagar, Gajsinghpura, Mahapura and other areas said frequent tripping and prolonged outages had become routine.A Gajsinghpura resident said, “We had power cuts 10 to 15 times Saturday.” Ganesh Nagar also witnessed repeated outages on Sunday, while residents of Mahapura said erratic supply had remained a year-round problem.Experts and NGOs in the power sector said the distribution network had failed to keep pace with rising demand and increasing household density, particularly in areas outside the core city.“Household density has increased outside the core city areas but not the power network. That’s why tripping has become a regular phenomenon,” said an NGO representative. He said the govt needs to invest in augmenting transformer and transmission-line capacity to address the problem.Poor maintenance has further compounded the issue, experts said. A representative of an expert agency said periodic maintenance was undertaken, but the quality of work was often inadequate, resulting in faults and breakdowns.Questions have also been raised over work carried out under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS). “Monitoring of the work under RDSS scheme has been lax, which has been reported in various areas. This is also not contributing to the solution,” the representative said.Industry sources said the disruptions could not simply be attributed to a shortage of electricity. During daytime, solar generation provides sufficient power to meet demand in many instances.“It is understandable if power cuts occur during evenings or peak hours when there is no supply from solar plants. But when power is not available during solar hours, it points to issues of operation and management and poor power network infrastructure,” another industry representative said.Residents said repeated outages were affecting daily life and essential activities, and called for better maintenance, stronger monitoring of infrastructure projects and timely augmentation of the distribution network.
