'Inverter sales in 10 days of heat & power cuts highest in 10 yrs'

KOLKATA: Home power backups, more popularly known as inverters, have been sold out following a surge in demand in the wake of frequent blackouts in different localities across the city. Shops selling the devices said they had recorded more sales in the past 10 days than they had in nearly 10 years.
Various localities, including parts of Behala and Haridevpur in the south-west, Garia in the south, Beliaghata in the east, Baguiati and Dum Dum in the north-east and localities off BT Road in the north, have been experiencing power-cuts on almost a daily basis late at night, and recently, also in the afternoon.
Power utility CESC has blamed it on the addition of huge undeclared load due to installation of more than 2 lakh air-conditioners that have tripped switches and fuses to protect the system.
Unable to sleep for over a week due to power-cuts between midnight and 3am almost every day, Ranjana Sengupta decided to get a home power backup so that the fans would at least operate during another outage. But on Ganesh Chandra Avenue, the home power backup hub, all shops had already run out of stock. Arun Kumar Gupta, owner of Addon Power, said that till recently, the only sales would happen was for uninterrupted power supply (UPS) for computers. "We had zero sales for home power backups in the past several months. But since May-end, we have been selling around 20 inverters per week. The last time we sold these many inverters was in 2012."
Domestic inverters with 650 watt capacity, which cost Rs 16,000-Rs 18,000 a piece, have the highest demand with customers queuing up from Jadavpur, Santoshpur, Dum Dum and Birati.
Sikhar from Sati Agency said UPS sales had also doubled since last year. "Sales have shot up so much that we have exhausted all the stock," he said.
A sales executive at a white goods retail chain said while customers were running around for ACs till a few days ago, enquiries were now pouring in for power backups. With power backups not available, the only hope for citizens living in places, where voltage fluctuation and tripping have become a daily occurance, is the arrival of monsoon.
"We have been experiencing power-cuts almost every week. This Wednesday, an outage started at night and it was out for more than an hour or so. Sudden power-cuts during the day are giving me trouble with some of the online courses," said Shreyan Chatterjee (21), a resident of the Ruby area.
Alina Chatterjee (47) from Sakher Bazar, Behala, is perplexed how the city that did not have power-cuts for the past two decades was now experiencing this crisis afresh. "We don't get power for almost two hours a day. Voltage is fluctuating, which affects devices. We do not have generators like the bigger complexes."