Now that the election is over, electricity outages are experienced every day but admittedly, for now they have not been too long. Last night, the power returned in just 30 min and during the day, each time it’s returned within 2 hours. Having been a New Gurgaon resident for some years, I’ve seen much worse.

I’m all for conserving power by willingly observing Earth Hours and organising my life around a known outage schedule — after all, I’m an Indian and used to a tough life! My complaint is really about a missing government office to announce an outage schedule and answer enquiries about long breakdowns.

May just happen when there is a clearer division of authority and accountability between HUDA, GMC and DHBVN…

There are days every week when outages last 5-8 hours at a stretch or certainly average to that long with their frequency on many other days.

I get goose-pimples thinking of the time when BSNL had monopoly in Gurgaon as a fixed line provider and a huge torture public had to go through to keep their phone lines functional. We’d to grovel for bills, and frequent fault repair required measures that are best left unrecalled. Then Airtel fixed line happened and there came other options in the form of WLL and multiple mobile service providers – and now when this city still has very little working from roads, sewage, municipal services, public transport, road signage to power outages, it feels a huge blessing to be using broadband provided by private ISPs, getting e-bills/sms reminders and paying bills online — even if computers have to be kept running on bigger and even bigger back-up devices.

We try hard to remain connected with the world in the hope that some company would find management of power a profitable business and lobby for its privatisation.