Puducherry : A report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India for the year ended March 2020 tabled on the floor of the House on Monday by Puducherry Chief Minister N Rangasamy stated that the Electricity Department of the Union Territory has not maintained good balance of interest between power utilities and consumers.
The report in its overview of compliance audit on power tariff, meter-reading, billing and collection system in the Puducherry Electricity Department pointed out that the Electricity Act, 2003 directs to maintain a healthy balance of interest between power utilities and the consumers. However, the audit of tariff, billing and collection efficiency of the department revealed that such a balance was not maintained as the gap between revenue and cost of power supplied to consumers had increased from Rs 97.57 crore to Rs 375.89 crore within three years ending 2019-2020.
The report pointed out that such an abnormal increase was on account of excessive transmission and distribution loss, disallowance of cost by the Joint Electricity Regulatory Commission (JERC), continuance with defective meters and non-claim/recovery of eligible subsidy and the revenue from the government and the consumers by the Electricity Department.
Besides, instances of short claim and non-claim of applicable tariff resulting in loss of revenue were also noticed, the report said.
Stating that the existing billing system was not efficient as there were several weaknesses in the software being used and nine per cent of the total of 4.78 lakh meters available were defective since many years which were not replaced within three months as prescribed.
The report said the non-replacement of the defective meters was even up to 25 years which vitiated the JERC regulations. In addition, Electricity Department was yet to replace 45,627 electro-mechanical meters with static meters as required.
It said the recovery under Revenue Recovery Act was not effective as only Rs 4.88 lakh was collected during the last three years ending March 2020 against the pendency of Rs 25.01 crore.
During 2017-2018 to 2019-2020, the collection efficiency slipped from 60.36 per cent to 54.90 per cent in respect of I.T bills. This resulted in accumulation of arrears of revenue to the extent of Rs 709.60 crore, it stated.
The poor performance of anti-power theft squad (APTS) was evident from its coverage of only up to 0.05 per cent of the total consumers during 2017-2020. Moreover , Electricity Department had not taken follow-up action on 82 per cent of the cases reported by the APTS which defeated the basic objective of inspection by the APTS.
Source: PTI
