Chennai power cuts lasting up to five hours have disrupted sleep and household routines in western suburbs including Valasaravakkam and Porur, with residents seeking clearer alerts and faster restoration from the Tamil Nadu Power Distribution Corporation Ltd (TNPDCL).
Several neighbourhoods reportedly remained without electricity from about 10.30pm to 3.30am on Thursday night. Residents said the outage affected students, office-goers and families dealing with heat and mosquitoes, while repeated assurances that supply would return shortly were not followed by immediate restoration.
S Easwaran, secretary of the Jyothi Nagar residents’ welfare association, told the Times of India that he contacted the assistant engineer of TNPDCL’s Porur division soon after the outage began. The official reportedly said electricity would be restored by 11pm, but the supply remained disrupted. Easwaran then contacted Minnagam, the electricity complaint service, where he was repeatedly told that power would return within 30 minutes.
“After a while his phone was switched off. I then called ‘Minnagam’ to register a complaint. They kept saying power would be restored within 30 minutes, but it took nearly five hours,” Easwaran said, according to the report.
Residents also said that interruptions were not limited to the overnight outage. S Geetha, a resident of Janakiraman Street in Porur, said her area had experienced daytime power cuts, mostly between 2pm and 4.30pm. She said the problem had not been seen in the area until August and that many households could not afford inverter systems.
“Not everyone can afford an inverter. We endure power cuts during the day too,” Geetha said. She added that residents’ associations in the western suburbs could organise a large-scale protest if the interruptions continued.
The outages have also raised concerns about the impact on children and public health conditions inside homes. P Sukumaran, a social activist, said several children in the neighbourhood had suffered from fever in recent weeks and that a few dengue cases had been reported. He said prolonged power cuts made the situation more difficult for residents, particularly when households were relying on fans during hot and humid nights.
Sukumaran also said residents had not received prior alerts about maintenance-related interruptions. Such notifications are important for households planning around electricity cuts, especially where residents depend on fans, water pumps, medical equipment or other appliances, although the report did not specify whether the outages were caused by scheduled maintenance or an equipment fault.
The disruption has placed attention on both service restoration and complaint communication in growing residential areas on Chennai’s western side. Residents said they wanted TNPDCL to explain the cause of the outages, issue advance alerts where interruptions are planned and provide more reliable restoration timelines.
The TNPDCL superintendent engineer for Chennai south did not respond to repeated attempts by the Times of India to obtain a response. No official explanation for the reported outages or a schedule for resolving them was available in the supplied report.
