Guides to power cuts in India
How to report an outage so it gets fixed, where your discom posts its planned shutdowns, what you are owed when it runs late, and the electrical reasons behind it all. Every figure is sourced to the regulator or the discom.
Step by step
How to file a power cut complaint that actually gets fixed
Most power cut complaints fail before anyone picks up a spanner. Nobody wrote down the number, the fault was never put against an address, or the ticket was closed while the street was still dark. Here is how to avoid all three, and where to go when the discom will not fix it.
Read the guideGuide
Where to find tomorrow's planned power cut list
Most planned power cuts in India are supposed to be announced a day or more before they happen. The trouble is that every discom announces them in a different place, and a few don't publish them at all. We checked the main discoms one by one.
Read the guideYour rights
Power cut too long? Your electricity company owes you money
Every state sets a deadline to bring the power back. Miss it, and the company has to pay you. Most people never ask.
Read the guideYour rights
A voltage surge burnt your appliance. What the discom owes you, and how to claim it
The law gives you a way to recover the cost of a fridge or television burnt by a fault on the discom's side. Whether you actually get it depends far less on the law than on what you write down in the first two days.
Read the guideExplainer
Low voltage is a fault, not weak power
Your connection is declared at 230 volts. When the board reads 170, nothing in the house is getting what it was built for — and the same sag that dims your lights is often what trips your area's transformer two hours later.
Read the guideExplainer
Why does my neighbour have power and I don't?
How electricity actually reaches your house in an Indian city, what a “feeder” is, and why — on a hot evening — the lights come back at your cousin's place two streets away while yours stay off.
Read the guideExplainer
How to read your electricity bill — and why it suddenly jumped
An Indian electricity bill is not units multiplied by a price. It is a stack of separate charges laid over slabs that get dearer as you climb them, and nearly every sudden jump has an ordinary cause you can find on the bill itself.
Read the guideCalculator
Inverter and battery size calculator
Tick what you want running during a cut and how long it has to last. You get the inverter VA, the battery Ah and the honest backup time — with the arithmetic shown, so you can check it in the shop.
Read the guide