PANAJI
The State government coughed up nearly Rs 600 crore (Rs 599.62 cr) to offset the revenue gap in the operations of the electricity department for the two financial years in the 2020-22 period.
This came out in the petition for 'true up' of the financial and operational statements presented by Chief Electrical Engineer, Stephen Fernandes at the public hearing conducted by the Joint Electricity Regulatory Commission (JERC) for Goa and the Union Territories.
The JERC's recently appointed chairperson, Alok Tandon, and its Member (Law) Jyoti Prasad, presided over the hearing which was held at the Institute Menezes Braganza hall in the capital on Thursday. The same exercise will be conducted in Margao on Friday.
The Rs 600-crore financial losses are the aggregate revenue gap between the money spent by the department for staff costs, operational costs, purchase of power and what it earns through recovery of power bills for the two Covid-19 hit financial years 2020-21 and 2021-22.
In 2020-21, the Electricity department made a loss of Rs 192.06 cr. The losses more than doubled to Rs 407.56 cr in the following year.
The department's Transmission and Distribution (T&D) losses also followed a similar rising trajectory in the same financial years. In 2020-21, the intra-State T&D losses were pegged at 7.74% while the inter-state losses were 3.62%, way above the 10% T&D losses it had projected in the JERC approved plan for the year.
The T&D losses showed no signs of abating in the following 2021-22 financial year and shot up to 8.46% (intra-state) and 3.65% (inter-state).
Intra-State losses is the power lost in transmission within the State, which are technical in nature due to faulty equipment and a large quotient of it is inevitable. The distribution losses are mostly power thefts.
The inter-State losses on the other hand are the sum of the power lost in drawing power from the national grid through other States, which are inevitable and beyond the control of the electricity department.
Meanwhile, employee costs accounted for Rs 332.21 crore in 2020-21 and another Rs 353.55 crore in 2021-22.
According to the CEE, however, the department has made massive capital investment in the year 2021-22 and has replaced on a fairly large scale transmission and distribution equipment and infrastructure across the State, including underground cabling in several new areas.
Fernandes who made a detailed power-point presentation in the true-up petition to the Commission, also attributed the disruption due to the Covid-19 pandemic for the high T&D losses and consequently the revenue gap in both the accounting years.
