Frequent power cuts have almost halted housework and seriously hampered industrial production in the port city of Chittagong, city dwellers and entrepreneurs complained.
Power Development Board officials on Wednesday said that they could supply 456 megawatts of power on the day as against the daily demand for 700MW.
Power officials said they got 75MW from two units of Kaptai Hydroelectric Project, 100MW from Raujan Thermal Power Plant, 39 from Shikalbaha Power Plant, 150MW from Shikalbaha Peking Power Plant, 20 from Regent Power Plant and 14MW from Malanch Power Plant and 58MW from the national grid.
City dwellers complained that they face 4 to 5-hour outage daily.
But, residents of Halishahar, north Agrabad, Pathan Tuli, Bakulia, Alkaran and Mehedibagh said they experienced longer outages.
Mitali Chowdhury, a housewife of Mehedibagh, said she could not use fridge for preserving foods as the machine remained off for most of the hours of a day for last few months due to power outages.
‘We even cannot sleep properly at night as overhead fans do not turn without electricity,’ she added.
‘My son, who is taking HSC exams, has been suffering a setback for outages,’ she also said.
PHP Group managing director Iqbal Ahmed said power crisis had significantly dropped industrial production as they were not getting uninterrupted supply in the daytime, while the supply had been remaining snapped from 6:00pm to 6:00am after the government made the decision last month.
He also said outages had been putting an adverse impact on price fixing of different items.
Factories had been incurring huge loss for slow production and they had to pay extra interest for bank loans.
Jahangir Alam, chairman of GPH Isphat, said they were the worst victim of power crisis as most of their machinery took several hours to run in full swing after disruption of power supply for once.
He said the national economy would have to pay high if the situation would remain the same.