Meghalaya needs more power projects to mitigate shortage of power supply: Mondal

Power Minister Abu Taher Mondal on Wednesday said there is need to ensure more power projects are implemented in the state to mitigate the shortage of power supply.

“We have to look very judiciously to see that some more power projects come to the state to mitigate the shortage of power supply,” Mondal said.

He said that the demand for power supply is increasing every year but the power generation somehow remains stagnant while adding “We are not able to get generation because of lots of factors. There are lots of projects but most of them are not economically viable.”

On the scrapping of the Kynshi power project, the minister said, “For Kynshi stage-I, originally the MoU was signed by one independent power producer and they wanted a particular height of the dam but then due to some reasons, one of the reason was that the atomic energy rejected the height of the dam because that might flood uranium mining. So the dam height came down and ultimately it became non feasible as for the cost benefit ratio is concerned, so ultimately they don’t want to go ahead with that project and we have scrapped that project.”

He informed that the department is working to implement a power project at Umiam River.

“We are working rigorously. Even I had a series of meetings with local MLA and leaders but somehow we are not able to convince one group of people, who do want to give land.

We are working our way out. This project has been given to NEEPCO and we feel that if the project can be implemented it will be a great help for the state and also will get around 12% of free power and 1% for local area development,” he added.

Meanwhile, the minister informed that the government is taking steps to minimize load shedding as much as possible.

“We are working already, we are on job, we are having review meetings to see that we very judiciously use our electricity so that we don’t have a situation that we had last year, we have suffered, we will try to minimize as much as possible,” he said.

According to him, there is no discussion about load shedding as the state is still in a better position.