Sri Vijaya Puram: Welcome to South Andaman’s hottest reality show: Who Wants to be a Powerless Millionaire? The rules are simple: the Electricity Department gives you a “tentative” load shedding schedule, you plan your life around it, and then the lights go out at completely different hours. Bonus points if you had something urgent to do.
In its latest press release, the Department patiently explained why the island’s power situation has gone from bad to black: a perfect storm of shutdowns, breakdowns, low solar output, rising temperatures, and, wait for it, everyone switching on their inverters and appliances at once when the lights come back. In short, the public’s crime is daring to use electricity when it’s available.
The headline culprit is the closure of the 5 MW NVVN Power Plant at Chatham, allegedly to make way for a shiny new 10 MW replacement “sometime in the future.” Until then, residents get to enjoy load shedding on a “rotational” basis. Rotational here meaning “you never know whose turn it is next.”
But what has made residents’ blood boil more than their overworked voltage stabilizers is the total failure to plan ahead. This wasn’t a meteor strike. This was a scheduled plant shutdown, known well in advance to both the Department and the Administration. A competent approach would have been to secure backup capacity, add temporary generation, or at least warn residents honestly about extended outages. Instead, the crisis plan appears to have been: wait for the system to collapse, then release a neatly formatted schedule and ask for public support.
The pièce de résistance lies in the fine print at the bottom of the schedule, a single sentence with the power of Thor’s hammer: Load shedding shall be done as and when required. Translation: The schedule you just read? Purely decorative. The lights can vanish anytime, day or night, without warning, for however long “technical reasons” demand.
Residents now report outages far longer than the promised 1-2 hours per batch. In many places, the blackout stretches into a 5-6 hour ordeal, throwing households, small businesses, and even hospitals into chaos. The “rotation” often loops back before you’ve even had a chance to recharge your phone.
And while the lights flicker and fans stall, there’s one thing that never fails to arrive on time, the electricity bill. In fact, many households have been hit with higher charges despite receiving fewer hours of actual supply. For residents, it’s an infuriating equation: pay more, get less, and don’t expect answers.
From midnight blackouts in Garacharma to pre-dawn darkness in Dollygunj, from evening outages in Haddo to candlelit dinners in Junglighat, the island has turned into a living experiment in patience. The only equaliser? The universal uncertainty over when the fan will stop spinning.
The Department says it’s working to mobilise a new 10 MW hiring plant, revive broken DG sets, and boost solar generation. In the meantime, residents are learning survival hacks, charging power banks at work, cooking in the afternoon before the next outage, and keeping kerosene lamps handy.
There’s no shortage of polite regrets from officials, but in the great blackout lottery of South Andaman, regret is free, and electricity comes in unpredictable installments. The Administration’s appeals for public cooperation are wearing thin, especially when the crisis was avoidable with foresight and planning.
Until then, islanders will keep playing the daily guessing game: Will the lights go at 4 pm, 6 pm, or just before you step into the shower? And will next month’s bill arrive with another surprise? In South Andaman, the only certainty is that the “tentative schedule” is the punchline to a joke nobody’s laughing at anymore.
