Daitapatis carry Lord Jagannath to the chariot during the pahandi ritual in Puri on Monday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

July 7: The temple town did not experience any power outage during car festival this year, thanks to underground cabling along the Grand Road, on which the chariots rolled.

“Every year I make it a point to visit Puri during rath yatra. Till last year, whenever I visited a cyber café in the town during the yatra, I had faced power-cut problems. But the situation has changed this year,” said Gourav Kumar Das, a tourist from Rourkela.

Shantanu Kumar Sahu, a senior general manager with the Central Electricity Supply Utility (Cesu) said that for the first time in Odisha underground cables were used in Puri, reducing the dependence on the roadside electric poles.

Earlier, the department used to snap power supply to prevent any mishap when the huge chariots were pulled on the Grand Road.

“Not only from the safety point of view, but also it will help in maintaining an uninterrupted power supply during the car festival and especially when the devotees pull the chariots,’’ he said.

The 16km long underground cables were laid along the Grand Road, Loknath temple and nearby area for over Rs 20 crore.

Energy department is also planning to have underground cable lines along five major stretches in Bhubaneswar, including around the 11th century Lingaraj temple in the Old Town area. Underground cables have been laid near the Sun Temple at Konark. The department is also planning to have such a network for some major roads in Cuttack, said Sahu.

Work to lay underground cables in Puri is nearly 80 percent done and rest will be over after the car festival. However, the state government is also planning to cover more areas of the holy town before the Nabakalebar next year.

“Besides safety aspects, the underground cabling will enhance the ambience of the pilgrim town from the tourism point of view,” said senior architect Akshay Beuria.