Residents of Sector 44 have been going without electricity throughout the day — courtesy the UT Administration’s project to widen the city roads. It has been four days now since the residents were besieged by acute power shortage, though Sunday came as a relief as no widening work was carried out.

The residents said daily power cuts from 8 am to 8 pm are common as the administration is shifting the electricity poles. “As the placement of the electricity poles is required to be changed after the widening, we need to snap the power supply for the duration when our work is on,” said a UT Administration official.

It seems the project is plagued by problems. Initially, it was the ‘unattended’ dug-up trenches that irked the residents, then there was the broken paver-blocks controversy, and now the electricity issue.

“One shudders to imagine the predicament we go through every day without electricity in such hot weather,” said Jaswant Singh, a resident of Sector 44.

M S Kahlon, a member of the Sector 44 Resident Senior Citizens Welfare Association, said: “As such the administration is doing a shoddy job of widening the roads. They put in the concrete first and then realise that they have to shift the poles and then dig up the road again. In three days, they have just managed to shift three poles. There must be over a hundred poles to be shifted. If their work continues at this pace, you can imagine our plight.”

Electricity department officials, however, said they are making arrangements to cause “minimum inconvenience” to residents and may even devise a method of switching off electricity on alternate days.