A lineman climbed a pole to cut off power supply at a local police station in Uttar Pradesh. A policeman asked: “What are you doing?” He replied calmly: “The other day you fined me ₹1,000 for not wearing a helmet. Our (electricity) department owes thousands of rupees to your police station.”
Many government offices and departments in different states go without electricity, if the same principle applies to them. Public sector discoms in the country have a total dues of ₹76,000 crore, payable by government offices and establishments, and in addition, state governments owe ₹78,000 crore to discoms for providing free electricity to farmers and subsidized power. Shailendra Dubey, chairman of the All India Power Engineers Federation (AIPEF), says that the weaker sections.
Mr. Dubey was in the city recently to attend the Round Table Conference on ‘Electricity (Amendment) Bill, 2022’ organized by AP State Electricity Employees JAC (APSPE JAC).
“India’s power generation capacity is 4 lakh MW and 49.5% of the installed capacity is already in private hands. The Center wants to privatize the entire power sector ignoring the interests of farmers and common consumers to benefit corporate groups. Hindu.
“The Amendment Bill provides for the operation of more than one distributor (licensee) in a region. We are not against healthy competition, but the bill allows private players to invest ‘money’ in the name of ‘distribution’ and thousands of crores of rupees on maintenance of distribution lines and assets to government distribution companies apart from adding new infrastructure have to spend. alleged.
The average cost of service for each unit of electricity is ₹7.45 paise. The state-owned discoms are providing an average subsidy of 55 paise per unit to the domestic consumers. This subsidy is being recovered by charging higher tariffs for industries and commercial consumers (cross subsidy).
The new licensing policy allows ‘cherry picking’ and private players will only choose profitable sectors such as industrial and commercial consumers, where they can get higher returns. By default, government discoms will suffer as they will be left with rural and domestic consumers, who will not be willing to pay higher tariffs.
Mr Dubey alleges that the Center was planning to push public sector discoms into losses and later sell their assets to private corporate groups. The revised rules could result in tariffs for farmers, who use a 7.5 HP agricultural pumpset for six hours, a day, paying ₹34,000 per month.
He said that withdrawing the draconian bill is the only way to protect the interest of common consumers.