By Arun Pratap Singh
Dehradun, 13 Dec: Last time, it was just two months before that the Uttarakhand Power Corporation Ltd (UPCL) had raised the power tariff. However, again a proposal has been mooted for proposing to hike the power tariff in Uttarakhand once again. If the proposal gets approved by Uttarakhand Electricity Regulatory Commission (UERC), then a hike from 5 to 8 percent in the power tariff may be thrust upon the consumers of various categories in the state.
Sources in the UPCL informed that the Audit Committee of Energy Corporation approved the proposal on Monday and that this proposal would be discussed in the next Board meeting of UPCL. Once this proposal is given a formal approval from the board meeting, it will then be submitted for final approval before the UERC. The sources claim that the UPCL management plans to submit the proposal before the UERC at the earliest.
On Monday, at the audit committee meeting held at the Energy Corporation Headquarters, it was pointed out that in the last financial year many schemes were worked on and electricity was purchased at expensive rates. The hike is proposed to offset the losses on purchase of power at high cost.
The proposal is to increase the electricity rate by five percent in the domestic category, seven percent in the commercial and eight percent for the industry. If the proposal is passed by the UPCL Board and Regulatory Commission, then the unit price will increase by 25 paise in domestic, 35 paise in commercial and 40 paise per unit for the industrial sector. In the audit committee meeting, MD Anil Kumar, Directors Ajay Agarwal, ML Prasad, Naveen Gupta, independent director BP Pandey were among those present on Monday.
It may be recalled that so far, power tariff has been raised three times already during the course of one year. Earlier this year, the UPCL had raised the power tariff by 26 paise to Rs 1.11 per unit. Power tariff was increased by 2.68 percent from 1 April. In September, UERC had again approved hike by 3.85 percent on the appeal of UPCL. Then, just the next month, i.e. in October, power tariff was again raised by 7 paise per unit. In total, an additional burden of 26 paise per unit has been forced upon the consumers who spend up to 100 units of electricity and additional burden of 51 paise upon the consumers who spend up to 200 units per month, while additional burden of 71 paise has been thrust upon consumers spending up to 400 units per month. An additional burden of Rs 1.02 has been affected for commercial connections while 96 paise hike has been seen in case of LT industries and a hike of Rs 1.11 per unit has been affected for HT industries.
