Delhi residents ask DERC not to revise power rates before audit report
21 Jun 2014
Conned into believing by the short-lived AAP administration power and water would be made available at cheaper rates in Delhi, Delhi's resident welfare associations have now come out strongly against the move to increase the power tariff in Delhi from July.
During a public hearing by Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) on Thursday on the tariff petition submitted by the discoms, activists and residents led by the Congress party in Delhi have asked the regulatory body to wait for the audit report from CAG before taking a decision on a tariff revision proposal.
The Congress party's state unit chief Arvinder Singh Lovely and four-time former MLA Mukesh Sharma disrupted the DERC's public meeting on Friday and demanded waiver of power bills in lieu of massive outages.
The leaders reached the DERC's public meeting at Siri Fort Auditorium at about 11 am and asked the commission to reapply the subsidies on lower slabs.
''If the discoms and the power department are not able to ensure uninterrupted power supply, the DERC must ensure that the consumers should get a rebate on their electricity bills in lieu of hours-long outages,'' Sharma said.
Delhi's power suppliers say they are facing a revenue deficit of 20-30 per cent and have demanded that either the tariff or the quarterly surcharge be raised to bridge this gap.
DERC chairperson PD Sudhakar also said a revision in tariff could be expected in July although he did not specify the exact nature of the changes proposed.
"None of the discoms have submitted the audited balance sheets with the true-up petition for 2012-13 as per the requirement of DERC. The petitions should therefore be rejected immediately. Secondly, when we went through the sales and purchase of electricity (documents) for 2013-14, the figures mentioned by the three discoms look manipulated. They are buying power from the same sources at different rates. Even the sales figures are manipulated," alleged Saurabh Gandhi, general secretary, United Residents of Delhi.
Rajiv Kakria, a resident of GK-I, said that as far as the fuel cost adjustment is concerned, fuel cost itself is calculated in an arbitrary manner by NTPC. Gandhi also alleged that in 2012-13, BSES (Yamuna) had paid Rs 9crore extra as fuel adjustment cost but recovered Rs38 crore from its customers. BSES (Rajdhani), with a bigger consumer base, spent Rs21 crore on fuel adjustment for the same period, but in three months, recovered Rs850 crore from its consumers, he alleged. "This means that the tariff should actually come down. The demand to increase tariff is completely unjustified," he said.
The residents are also asking for the benefits of control in power theft, a primary factor for privatising power in Delhi. They say the distribution losses should be treated as a business loss and not part of the tariff.
"Discoms should make public how many distribution transformers are making a loss. The distribution transformers that are showing a loss of over 20 per cent should be placed on their websites," said Kakaria.
Residents have also asked for discoms to put up on their websites details of power purchased with price and source "so that consumers can verify the prevailing competitive costs in the market".
