Power supply to two Kuki-Zo majority districts — Churachandpur and Pherzawl — was restored on Tuesday night after a complete black-out since Friday 2am.
The development came hours after a Kuki-Zo organisation alleged sabotage of the transmission line by miscreants in the valley.
A Churachandpur-based official said the power supply to the two districts got snapped on Friday due to a breakdown in supply at Ningthoukhong in Bishnupur district, about 30 km from Churachandpur town but he did not know whether it was “due to natural fault/damage or sabotage to 132 KV transmission line”.
“We started receiving power around 6pm today and consumers around 6.30-7 pm in Churachandpur. Pherawal was restored around two hours later according to the information I received. There was also no power on January 31 but it was resolved the next day but again we were left without power on February 2,” the official said on Tuesday.
Reports emanating from Imphal said the outage was because of a technical fault and that the ongoing unrest has restricted the free movement of people leading to issues with the maintenance of power lines, an issue which was cited by the Churachandpur official. “I can’t cross the Churachandpur border because of the prevailing situation,” he said. Bishnupur is a Meitei-majority district.
Since the unrest erupted, no Kuki-Zo can venture into valley districts nor any Meitei can enter Kuki-Zo areas because of safety issues. The strife has claimed at least 207 lives and left over 67,000 displaced and the situation remains volatile in the periphery of the hills and valley.
However, the power outage of the past four days adversely impacted internet, banking, healthcare services and students and left civil society organisations perturbed, a Churachandpur resident said.
A statement released by the Indigenous Tribal Leaders’ Forum, a conglomerate of recognised tribes in Churachandpur, hours before power was restored, claimed there were three lines which supplied power to Churachandpur and Pherzawl before the ethnic conflict erupted on May 3 last year, “but two were destroyed by Meitei miscreants in June, 2023. The remaining line was sabotaged on two previous occasions before the February 1 incident”.
