Praveer Sinha

Selective memory is one of the least understood and perhaps even lesser appreciated human qualities. It is an evolutionary trait and a survival tool we seem to have developed not just to retain happy moments of our relatively short lives but also to save us from reliving the bad ones. 

The sight of first responders, mostly fire fighters who rushed towards the crumbling twin towers in New York on 9/11 or the incredibly brave security forces many of whom made the ultimate sacrifice in Mumbai on 26/11, continues to haunt us even today. 

There can be little debate over honouring these brave men and women not just in the name of national security but as a fundamental duty we cannot afford to slack at. That is what makes us humans and a worthy member of humanity.

But the slacking seems to be more common in situations that are far less complex but counts innumerable sacrifices that rarely make it into our collective conscience, let alone remain there for long. 

Over the last nearly two years, I have come across many such heroes not running towards burning buildings or braving bullets but wading through flooded cities, towns, and even villages barely touched by civilisation fixing power lines destroyed by natural calamities. The situation created by the well-anticipated annual cyclone season was particularly worsened by an invisible enemy called Covid-19. 

I am talking about thousands of power sector workers from across the country in large cities like Mumbai and Delhi and lesser-known towns like Balasore, Bhadrak, Jajpur or Kendrapara in Odisha who ensured that power supply continued to flow uninterrupted during the raging pandemic.

I don’t tell this often, but believe me when I tell you that being a utility worker can be seriously daunting when you are caught between a 140 kmph cyclone in the middle of a crippling pandemic. And that is exactly what happened in the last week of May 2021 when Cyclone Yaas hit India’s Eastern coast in Odisha around the same time the second wave of the Covid-19 was peaking.

These power victors were right there working shoulder to shoulder with the health workers. It can be quite overwhelming even for the toughest amongst us. Many power sectors workers even lost their lives in the line of duty.

When the product is something as ubiquitous as electricity, the room for slacking is practically zero. Without power very little in modern civilisation works. Hospitals, factories, work from home, cold storages, essential services like telecom and water supply cannot function without the backing of uninterrupted power. When we fail, everything downstream fails. It is as simple as that.

Corona care centres

Right through the last twenty-odd months, the power sector has been at the forefront of the battle, not only ensuring the power supply remains uninterrupted at hospitals and corona care centres but also moving heaven and earth to have new corona care centres ready, as and when these have been set up across the country. It meant staff staying at the office on makeshift beds and mattresses when nearly all the cities were divided up in colour-coded zones based on the severity of Covid-19 in the first phase, connecting power to oxygen filling stations that came up during the second wave, and facing up to multiple storms — the Amphan, to Yaas to Tautke — and keeping the power supplies uninterrupted. 

For a typical utility worker whether it was a linesman fixing fallen power poles or an engineer overseeing nodal command centres, the twin challenges of cyclones and pandemic became unusually demanding. The personal risks apart, this rare kind of call of duty demanded an unprecedented level of resourcefulness and thinking on their feet all the time. For example, at the peak of the cyclone season last year, our distribution companies in central and north Odisha had to mobilise over 13,000 workers at different sites to ensure the quick restoration of power supply in the severely-affected areas.

Thousands of my colleagues in the power sector, who braved through these tough times, continue to come to work without showing any sign of mental or physical fatigue. Soon after the second wave, in July 2021, India’s peak power demand hit a new record of 200GW. No doubt, it is their commitment that has made India the third-largest producer and second-largest consumer of electricity in the world.

With the spread of Omicron cases in the country, they know there are miles to go through the dark tunnels before they see the light of a normal day at work. They believe that their work is as critical as frontline healthcare workers who are saving millions of lives across the country. 

I believe they deserve a little space in our bank of selective memory lest they step into history as unsung heroes lost to time. I salute them for their resilience, commitment and diligence and may your tribe increase.

The writer is CEO and MD, Tata Power. Views are personal

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