Now Reading: Andhra tribal hamlet gets streetlights back after DC report
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Andhra tribal hamlet gets streetlights back after DC report
Tribal villagers of Uduvalasa Gadavapalem in Anakapalli district, who held a candlelight protest on Sunday after three months without streetlights, got power restored on Monday. The Deccan Chronicle reported their plight on…
Tribal villagers of Uduvalasa Gadavapalem in Anakapalli district, who held a candlelight protest on Sunday after three months without streetlights, got power restored on Monday. The Deccan Chronicle reported their plight on Sunday, and officials from APEPDCL visited the hamlet, repaired the system and restored lighting by evening.
Residents of the PVTG Gadaba community said absence of lights made nights unsafe due to snakes and scorpions. Protester Neelapu Devudamma said they had contacted the electricity department and the panchayat repeatedly but were told bills were pending or no complaint had been raised. CPM leader K. Govinda Rao demanded an inquiry and accountability from panchayat and electricity officials.
However, the APEPDCL superintending engineer told the collector that their inspection found the lights had been non-functional for only about five days, not three months, due to burnt wires and an MCB fault. He claimed no complaint was registered before the newspaper report, and that the panchayat secretary had replaced fittings a week earlier. The department said the issue was rectified immediately after the report.
Indian Opinion Analysis
The same newspaper that first reported the protest also reports the official denial of a three-month outage. The initial story foregrounds tribal suffering and official buck-passing, framing it as a coordination failure that endangered a vulnerable community. The follow-up story leads with restoration and credits its own reporting, while the engineer's account reduces the outage to a five-day technical fault. The two versions cannot both be fully accurate. Readers should note the district collector had already sought an explanation before the restoration, the next step is to see whether the panchayat's pending bills are independently audited.
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Coverage: 2 sources, 1 government-critical, 1 neutral
Sources (2): deccanchronicle.com (government critical), deccanchronicle.com (2) (neutral report)
This story was synthesised by AI from the 2 sources linked above.
Updated: this story now draws on 2 sources.
