Residents of a part of Sylhet city blocked the Sylhet-Tamabil Highway for more than for one hour on early Wednesday, demanding immediate resumption of power supply.
Several hundred residents of Islampur put up barricades on the highway at about 12:30am to protest against the delay in replacing the electrical transformer that went out of order on Monday night.
The agitated people also set fire to old tires during the blockade and chanted slogans demanding immediate steps to resume power supply to the area, said locals.
The protesters said that they would not go home until resumption of power supply to their area, said Abul Miah, a resident of Shyamali Residential Area in Islampur.
Ehsan Ahmed, president of a social welfare organisation, said they had requested officials of the Power Development Board repeatedly between Monday night and Tuesday to repair the inoperative electric transformer and resume the power supply to reduce the suffering of the people observing Ramadan.
But the PDB authorities did not take any steps at all to repair or replace the transformer and resume electricity supply to Islampur, the home of more than ten thousand people, he said.
On Tuesday night at around 11:30pm a group of senior people of the area went to the headquarters of the Rapid Action Battalion-9 and informed the officials of their suffering.
The RAB-9 authorities, responding to the locals' request, requested the PDB authorities to take an immediate initiative to restore the power supply to Islampur.
The locals got furious as none of the PDB officials or employees went to the area till Wednesday 12:30am to repair or replace the transformer, which went out of order on Monday night, and started demonstrating and blocked the highway, said local sources.
On being informed, a team of the Sylhet Metropolitan Police of Shahparan thana rushed to the spot at around 1:30am and persuaded the protesters to lift the barricade on the highway after assuring them that power supply would be resumed by Wednesday, said sources in the police.
PDB Sylhet office's chief executive engineer, Shahinul Islam Khan, on Wednesday afternoon said they were trying to complete repair of the transformer in the shortest possible time.
'Replacing the inoperative transformer by a new one is not possible as an acute shortage of transformers is prevailing in Sylhet,' he added.
Source : New Age
No comments:
Post a Comment