When IT professional Ashish Mathur (44) moved from his ancestral house in Chandni Chowk to east Delhi's Patparganj in 2002, he made it a point to buy an inverter. He had a small enclosure neatly marked out in the house for what was then the most essential of household gadgets.
Today, Mathur lives in the same house but newspapers have taken the inverter's place. It had, he recalls, malfunctioned soon after he had moved but the need to repair it was never felt. Eventually, it was discarded. "We've had no need for power backup in the last two decades. There's an outage once in a while in summers but those are fleeting ones," says Mathur, who grew up in a very different Delhi in the 80s and 90s when power was supplied by Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking (DESU).
