the goan I network
PANAJI
This is how it works.
For the year 2017-18, the department is expected to have net costs of ` 1,845 crore in power purchasing, employee salaries and maintenance costs. The collection revenue at existing tariffs total ` 1,720 crore, thus leaving a ` 125 crore revenue gap.
Revenue gaps happen every year and are usually filled through main Budget allocations. Sometimes, the gap is carried forward to the next year.
The gap, or deficit for 2017-18 went up to ` 149 crore after the revenue gap of ` 9 crore from the previous year and a ` 14 crore interest on security deposits owed by the department to consumer were added.
With this gap being filled with the ` 149 crore budgetary support, why is the department charging an extra ` 0.76 per unit?
This increase in electricity charges was proposed to make up for the payment of power that was supplied from the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Corporation Ltd (MSEDCL).
“It is submitted that a particular Consumer of Goa is getting power supplied from MSEDCL due to lack of distribution infrastructure of EDG in that area. In the said case, MSEDCL issues the bill to department and the department issues the same bill to the consumer in addition to other services such as attending any fuse off calls to the consumer, etc,” said the EDG in its petition.
But interestingly, calculations for the ` 0.76 per unit figure are based on employee, administrational and operational costs as and not on units of power supplied.
The department’s petition reads, “An approval is sought from JERC for recovery of Service charges against the billing, collection, etc provided by the Department which will be equivalent to per unit charge of Employee cost and Administrative & General Cost.”
This paragraph alone blows away the MSEDCL fig leaf that the electricity department sought to hide behind.
Here is the calculation.
The department has taken into account ` 254.24 crore as employee costs and ` 10.12 crore as administrative costs for a total of 3,494 MU of power. A simple division of cost by total number of units brings up the figure of 0.76 per unit.
Is this the norm? Is this method of calculating charges or tariffs used every year? The answer is ‘no’. So why did the department use it only in 2017-18? To camouflage a tariff hike!
More hikes likely?
PANAJI: The electricity department very frequently uses budgetary support to make up for revenue gaps. But for three years, it has received no budgetary support and instead has to fill a revenue gap of over ` 660 crore.
With the department making it very clear in its petition that this amount would be recovered from the consumer, Goa could be looking at power hike in the near future.
According to the petition submitted by the electricity department to the Joint Electricity Regulatory Corporation (JERC), for three years, from 2013 to 2016, a total of over ` 660 crore has to be recovered from consumers.
A budgetary gap of ` 139 crore for 2013-14, ` 213 crore for 2014-15 and ` 314 crore for 2015-16 were registered, but is listed as the gap yet to be recovered from consumers.
Incidentally, tariff were increased in the year 2012 by 11.8 percent, in 2014 by 7.6 percent, in 2015 by 14 percent and in 2016 by 4.85 percent. This year, though the department has not proposed any tariff hikes, could the ` 0.76 per unit be a means to recover the ` 660 crore gap for the years from 2013 to 2016?
