The district administration has issued orders to replace burnt transformers in five hours to ensure round-the-clock electricity in Muzaffarpur by the end of this year.

District magistrate Anupam Kumar said he would ensure power supply is streamlined in the district by November-December this year.

In a bid to realise chief minister Nitish Kumar’s commitment to provide round-the-clock power to the people before the 2015 Assembly elections, Anupam has decided to replace burnt transformers in five hours and better Gujarat’s record of 12 hours.

“It is said that burnt transformers are replaced within 12 hours in Gujarat. But I have launched a system under which they would be replaced in Muzaffarpur within five hours from November-December this year,” he said.

The administration has started to provide licences to electricians for minor repairs of transformers such as plugging of fuse. The power department has also launched massive house-to-house and pole-to-pole surveys to identify power consumption and condition of supply line wires in different areas. Meters would also be installed on feeders to check theft of electricity.

In urban areas, at present, burnt transformers are replaced in a day or two while in rural areas the same task takes three more days. Anupam seeks to streamline this with daily monitoring and provide round-the-clock power from December. He has also ordered officials to ensure every household is brought under the billing system, thereby checking electricity theft as well as boost revenue.

However, rural consumers would be charged according to their power consumption and not based on fixed billing, as prevalent in several rural pockets now. Against 10 lakh families in the district, only 2.5 lakh households come under the billing system, resulting in huge loss of revenue for the government. So power department officials have been directed to motivate families to get new connections and not hook power.

Uninterrupted power has long been a demand for the people of the state. The chief minister, in his Independence Day speech last year, promised to extend power supply to all villages in the state before the Assembly elections in 2015. He had made several key changes in the energy department to fulfil his promise. Since generation of power is abysmally low in the state, the government has started commissioning new power plants.