Lucknow: Frustrated by prolonged power cuts, Gonda villagers reached a power substation and made a junior engineer place his hand on ‘Hanuman Chalisa’ and admit how many hours of electricity was supplied in a 24-hour day.The unusual protest took place at the Katra Bazar power substation around 8.30 pm on Friday. A video of the incident, showing villagers questioning the JE and recording the proceedings, surfaced on social media.The villagers alleged that electricity was available at the substation but supply to their feeder was stopped frequently. Residents claimed they had been receiving less than two hours of regular power in a day for the past six months.JE Adarsh Kumar Ojha submitted a complaint against unidentified people, alleging abuse, threats, damage to official documents and obstruction of govt work.Police said they were investigating the complaint. Meanwhile, MLA Bawan Singh held a meeting with officials and directed that a delayed 5 MVA transformer be commissioned before Sep 10 to address the problem of short supply.Katra Bazar SHO Manoj Pathak said a video had surfaced showing villagers questioning power officials over outages. Police received a complaint from the electricity department and will take action after looking into the allegations.
