TN government deploys teams, vehicles to tackle Chennai's severe power cuts

Public frustration and anger over persistent power outages in Chennai and several other districts has pushed Tamil Nadu's electricity distribution utility, TNPDCL, into a crisis-response mode.

Electricity Resources and Law Minister CTR Nirmal Kumar personally flagged off 10 high-level monitoring teams and 125 special power restoration patrol vehicles at the TNPDCL headquarters on June 11 to tackle this problem, a day after chairing an emergency review meeting with Chief Secretary M Sai Kumar and senior power sector officials.

Crisis-response mode

The scale of the response reflects the depth of public anger. Complaints of prolonged, unannounced outages — stretching through nights in suburban areas such as Pallavaram, Chromepet, Tambaram and parts of north Chennai — have grown louder over recent weeks, with residents in some localities blocking roads in protest.

Also Read: Explained | The lottery case that put Martin family back in the spotlight

The utility, Tamil Nadu Power Distribution Corporation Limited (TNPDCL), which was carved out of the restructured TANGEDCO in 2024 and now serves around 35.2 million consumers across the state through 1,910 substations and over 4,47,000 transformers, has struggled to keep pace with peak-summer demand that has repeatedly broken records in recent years.

Real-time fault tracking

The newly-deployed teams will track major breakdowns in real time, ensure prompt fault reporting, monitor restoration timelines and coordinate across distribution, transmission and generation wings.

Also Read: Bharathiraja obit: Why the filmmaker was more than the sum of his films

Further, for urgent maintenance and immediate power restoration work, contingency allowances have been sanctioned up to Rs 1,00,000 for chief engineers, up to Rs 75,000 for supervising engineers, up to Rs 50,000 for operational engineers, up to Rs 25,000 for assistant operational engineers, and up to Rs 10,000 for assistant and junior engineers.

Root causes under focus

Electricity Minister CTR Nirmal Kumar also examined measures to promptly rectify intermittent power interruptions caused by unexpected faults such as buried cable damage, transformer failures, line breaks, seasonal factors like rain and wind, RMU (ring main unit) malfunctions, and high-voltage transformer defects even as overall generation and power procurement in Tamil Nadu are adequate.

The objective was to ensure an uninterrupted electricity supply to consumers in affected urban and suburban areas, the release added.

(With agency inputs)