Photo: CMO Haryana / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
The Haryana government on Friday said it will invoke Section 108 of the Electricity Act, 2003, to intervene against the state regulator’s decision letting a private company distribute power in Gurugram and Nuh, the key demand of the electricity employees whose strike has left large parts of Gurugram, Faridabad and several other districts without power since Wednesday night.
Energy minister Anil Vij said he had discussed the move with Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini and that union leaders had agreed to meet government representatives at the PWD Rest House in Panchkula at 3 pm. He said he was confident the strike would end “in just a few hours”.
What Section 108 allows
The provision lets a state government issue written policy directions to its electricity regulatory commission on matters of public interest. Energy department officials said this would allow the government to override the Haryana Electricity Regulatory Commission’s order granting Eleven Power a 25-year parallel distribution licence. How exactly the order would be undone will depend on the legal process that follows and on what the regulator does.
Vij had earlier said the state would also challenge the licence before the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity and seek a stay. Haryana Power Engineers Association general secretary Ravinder Ghanghas said the unions had received the government’s invitation and that the course of the strike would depend on the outcome of the meeting.
Blackouts, dry taps and road blockades
The three-day strike by employees of the state-run Dakshin and Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigams began at 10 pm on October 21 and is scheduled to run until October 24. With staff not attending to faults and many switching off their phones, outages have been reported in Gurugram, Faridabad, Nuh, Sonipat, Rewari, Jhajjar, Karnal and Ambala. Officials said Gurugram alone logged more than 3,000 complaints in the first 12 hours, and reports put the number of affected homes in the city at over 50,000.
Factories in Gurugram’s Sector 37, Kadipur, Basai and Daulatabad industrial areas have been hit, with industry representatives warning of production losses and delayed deliveries. Long cuts have also stopped water supply in many colonies. Residents of Faridabad’s Friends Colony blocked Sohna Road after more than 24 hours without power, villagers near Rewari blocked National Highway 352, and private hospitals in Yamunanagar said patients were struggling. Police have been posted at electricity offices.
Congress MP Deepender Singh Hooda attacked the Chief Minister over the outages in a post on X.
Why the employees walked out
The unions, representing about 40,000 regular, contractual and outsourced workers and engineers, say allowing a private distributor into high-revenue Gurugram and Nuh would let it pick off profitable urban and industrial consumers while the state utilities carry the cost of supplying rural and farm users. They fear for jobs and the finances of the public network. The government says it also opposes the licence and argued against Eleven Power’s application before the regulator, but lost.
What happens next
If Friday’s talks succeed, the unions are expected to call off the strike and begin restoring supply. Restoration across thousands of pending faults may still take time. The legal fate of the Eleven Power licence will then rest on the Section 108 directions and the appeal before the tribunal.
