Jayalalithaa asks centre for 1,000 mw of power

CHENNAI: Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Monday sou­ght the personal intervention of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to allocate an additional 1,000 MW of po­wer from June 2011 to May 2002 from the Central grid to cope with the severe power shortage faced by Tamil Nadu. She also asked the PM to instruct the authorities to speed up the completion of the ongoing central power projects in Tamil Nadu.In her letter to Manmohan Singh on Monday, the CM said that due to increasing demand and stagnant generation of power, the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board had been resorting to scheduled load shedding of about 1,500 MW and frequent unscheduled load shedding. “This has badly affected the indust­rial sector and domestic consumers. Agriculture is the worst hit sector due to irregular and inadequate supply of power to agricultural pump sets, thus affecting food production,” she said.The CM said she feared that power shortage would continue for a while as addit­ional power generation cou­ld take one or two years, with many new projects in various stages of completion.