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Staff crunch at PSPCL substations in Ludhiana: Hiring plan afoot, says official
Chief engineer (P&M wing) Punnardeep Singh Brar says there are plans to recruit around 400 substation assistants across Punjab; he says a meeting was held with CMD over SCADA systems
Despite the recent recruitment of around 768 technical staff in Ludhiana, including 348 regular assistant linemen, substations across the city continue to reel under an alarming manpower crunch, some of which are often run by a single employee, officials said. No new staff have been assigned to existing substations, leaving critical power infrastructure exposed to delays, outages and serious safety risks, they said.
Reportedly, several substations in Ludhiana are reportedly being managed single-handedly, with one employee handling duties meant for eight to nine. Workers say the situation has persisted for years, with no new staff appointed for existing substations, pushing employees into exhaustion and overwork.
Rashpal Singh, deputy general secretary of the PSEB Employees Federation (AITUC), said, “The newly hired technical staff have been deployed in the distribution wing, not in substations. Ludhiana is an industrial city with an enormous demand on power grids. In such conditions, leaving a single staff member to manage an entire substation is highly unfair and unsafe.”
Singh further noted that the manpower crisis is largely attributed to the introduction of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems in Ludhiana, which was intended to automate 39 substations in Ludhiana. The aim was to reduce the manual intervention in substations. Following this, the power department abolished several critical posts, employees said. But even years later, SCADA has not become fully functional. As a result, the posts were removed, pushing one or two staff to manage the entire substation with no new employee recruited to fill the gap.
Ashok Kumar, a senior substation official, said the crisis stems from cadre restructuring orders issued in 2019 and 2022 following the roll out of SCADA. “Earlier, each substation had eight to nine staff members, including three substation assistants, a junior engineer, four teammates and one oil cleaner. But now, only three operators remain, each managing one of the three shifts. The workload is overwhelming, we cannot take weekly offs, emergency leave or even gazetted holidays,” he said.
When contacted, chief engineer (P&M wing) Punnardeep Singh Brar said, “We are planning to recruit around 400 new substation assistants across Punjab. We also held a meeting with CMD Basant Garg today to begin the functioning of SCADA systems and address the ongoing manpower issues.”
