India's power crisis hits summer goods, medical stocks: Report

Essential medicines are also being impacted as power cuts break cold storage chains

India's power crisis, which has resulted in multiple states starting multi-hour power cuts, is also impacting the sales of traditional summer goods such as ice-creams and soft drinks as well as medical goods as retailers refuse to stock large quantities of such goods due to lack of extended power backup, a media report said.

Peak power shortage rose swiftly last week from a single digit of 5.24 GW on Monday to touch a double-digit of 10.77 GW on Thursday, showing the effects of various factors like low coal stocks at generation plants, heatwave and other issues on the deepening electricity crisis.

“The power shortage is impacting offtake of categories such as ice creams. Household demand is being impacted, and neighbourhood retailers are unable to stock inventories because many of them don’t have so much power back-up systems,” RJ Corp chairman Ravi Jaipuria told The Economic Times. The company holds the bottling rights for PepsiCo and operates its own ice-cream brand Creambell.

“Frequent power cuts are causing disruptions in stocking of cold or frozen products, and dozens of kirana shop owners have stopped stocking ice cream and other cold items, since the products run the risk of deterioration,” Prem Kumar, chief of retail tech company SnapBizz, told the publication.

He also said that the break in cold storage chain is resulting in degradation of essential medicines. Multiple mid-sized medical stores have stopped keeping stock of select vaccines and medicines that need cold storage facilities, he added.

“Demand for replenishment from the smaller and mid-sized neighbourhood grocery stores has fallen by half in markets like Delhi-NCR and Punjab. They don’t want to keep the frozen products since these have to be stocked at a certain temperature which is being hampered because of the power outages,” an executive said under condition of anonymity.

India is currently facing its worst heatwave condition in 122 years, and temperatures in part of the country have crossed 45 degrees Celsius. Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, head of the India Meteorological Department, said that the country is bracing for temperatures to "rise to a record high."

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