Power crisis in city: Pay more to get less
26 April 2014 5:54 AM IST
The summer season is in full swing and there is no respite in sight for Delhi’s citizens. 82 per cent of power consumers in the city will have to pay more for lower amounts of electricity. On the one hand, distribution companies are announcing power cuts up to eight hours under the garb of ‘maintenance’ and on the other hand they have started sending non-subsided electricity bills. Ironically, leaders and workers from the three major parties, BJP, Congress and AAP, have shunned the city for outstation election campaigns and consumers are left with no one to address their concerns.
As per the planned outage schedule, the city faced power cuts at 174 areas. These areas have had to face six to seven-hour power cuts, under the garb of ‘maintenance’. The areas which were hugely affected by long power cuts were Saket, Chandni Chowk, Nand Nagari, Daryaganj, Dilshad Garden, Palam, and Krishna Nagar. Companies have declared huge power cuts in 185 areas on Saturday and 132 areas on Sunday. Interestingly the scheduled outage in the areas of Reliance-owned BYPL and BRPL are mostly 6 to 7 hours, while areas fed by Tata-owned TPDDL, power cuts range from one to four hours.
Interestingly, power companies had stopped the upload of comparative data for scheduled outages immediately after fall of Arvind Kejriwl-led AAP government.
However the data for comparative load shedding available with power department revealed that in the first nine days of January, the average outage duration in 2014 was 5.43 hours, as compared to 5.22 hours in 2013. Similarly this period saw 225 outages in 2013 and 229 in 2014. A total load shedding of 1175.41 hours was conducted in 2013, which increased to 1243.66 in the same period in 2014. However, even senior officers from the power department are tight lipped on why distribution companies stopped the declaration of such comparative data.
‘We have started sending electricity bills to power consumers on revised rates, as the government has not given us any directions,’ said a senior officer of a power distribution company, adding that the discoms are bound to act as per rules. TPDDL has an electricity bill schedule of 45 days, while BYPL and BRPL send bills every month. So far consumers using up to 200 unit of power were charged at Rs 1.95 per unit. However, they are now being charged at Rs 3.90 per unit. Similarly, those using 200-400 units were paying at Rs 2.90 per unit and are now charged Rs 5.80 per unit. The AAP government had provided a flat 50 per cent subsidy to consumers using up to 400 units. However, the subsidy was discontinued as the government did not plan for an extension after 31 March. The move had provided relief to over 28 lakh power consumers in the city out of total 34.61 lakh consumers. Thus the bill amount consumers receive has doubled for consuming the same amount of power.
‘The people should not be punished for the faults of the government and bureaucracy. The subsidy was being provided since the last 10 years. However it was discontinued for very technical reasons,’ said NN Mishra, president of RWA in Mayur Vihar area. ‘We are facing six to seven hours power cuts frequently but we have nowhere to complain as company officials have termed it a scheduled power cut,’ he added.
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