Startups and smaller businesses across Pune felt the impact of the power outage. The mornings are when Felice Pasticceria in the upmarket Kothrud area of the city is humming full steam, as bread is made and croissants are baked. On Wednesday, work at the bakery could continue as usual thanks to a 65 KW diesel generator that worked four hours. “Because of the generator, our batches did not go to waste. In baking, if there is no electricity even for a couple of minutes and the oven switches off, your whole batch is wasted. Even last week, there were power failures on two days, for no apparent reason. The cost of running a diesel generator is huge and we have incurred a big loss,” says Prasad Kapre of Felice Pasticceria.
Startups and smaller businesses across Pune felt the impact of the power outage in terms of cancelled meetings, phone and laptop batteries dying mid-call and delayed work schedules.
Amit Mishra of Interview Mocha says, “People are working remotely and not everybody has inverters or power backup. In our case, there were a couple of hiccups as support to a foreign client was delayed, but the team rallied and we pulled it off.”
Manufacturing is heavily dependent on electricity and an outage for an extended period can disrupt production cycles. Cyriac Thomas of Umami Brew says, “Since the production schedule was disturbed, the end bottling schedules are also delayed. The rest is that the output is getting reduced because of the power cut.”
On the other hand, Friyey, a co-working startup that operates 10 spaces across the city, witnessed a surge in clients. “Normally we have 70 per cent occupancy but Wednesday morning recorded 100 per cent occupancy in every centre. We noticed that people who were struggling with power backup at home came in to work at our centres,” says Yogesh Thore, founder and CEO of the startup.
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