AP: Extra financial burden for 36 months

VIJAYAWADA: The true-up charges imposed on consumers for the next 36 months by the electricity department puts an extra financial burden on present tenants, as they have to pay the charges of earlier tenants who had occupied the same space.

The electricity department started the collection of true-up charges across the state, covering 1.64 crore consumers. The AP Electricity Regulatory Commission (APERC) had accorded permission to the discoms to collect a total of Rs 2,910.74 crore on this count, to cover up the difference between generation, transmission and distribution costs and final revenues, that’s too related to the period from 2014-15 to 2018-19.

Consumers are receiving power bills with true-up charges, under which it is stated that this was the 1/36 installment.

There were 1.47 crore domestic, 14.65 lakh commercial and 1.63 lakh industrial power connections across 26 districts. Discoms are currently issuing bills including true-up charges in the July month’s bill.

Last year, the discoms had imposed true-up charges but the collection was stopped after Telugu Desam, Congress and other parties staged protests. From this month, discoms restarted the collection, affecting 1,63,28,000 consumers.

Tenants keep vacating rented houses and new tenants occupy the space. The present tenants have to pay true-up charges for the previous periods when there were tenants.

Tenants P Poorna and D Srinivas said the electricity department is imposing Rs 85 per month for 36 months on consumers like them, which meant a collection of Rs 3100 per consumer using as low as 200-250 units per month.

CPM state executive committee member Babu Rao said chief minister Jagan Reddy had promised not to put any additional charge on electricity consumers.

Opposition leaders urged the state government to stop the collection of additional charges and warned of fresh protests if the government continued with the collections.