Ludhiana, July 25 -- After more than 10 incidents of assault, abuse and vandalism at grid substations this summer, the Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) has sought police protection and regular patrolling for all 92 substations under its Central Zone, saying repeated attacks on engineers and field staff responding to outages have emerged as a serious operational and law-and-order concern.

The move comes amid an acute shortage of technical manpower, compounded by an ongoing employee agitation that has further reduced the availability of trained field staff. As a result, sub-divisional officers (SDOs), executive engineers (XENs) and other senior officials have increasingly been supervising and undertaking field operations to r...