BRS Burdened Power Consumers With Over Rs 20,000 Crore in Its 10-Year Rule

Hyderabad: While appearing before the Electricity Regulatory Commission, a representative of the state government stated that the government is ready to provide support to power utilities for 2024-25 as per the tariff order approved by the commission.

This led to the commission chairman T. Sriranga Rao announcing on Monday that there would be no tariff hike for any category of consumers since the state government had come forward to bear the Rs 1,200 crore tariff hike proposed by the power utilities.

In contrast, sources in the government said, the previous BRS government had burdened the consumers with over Rs 20,000 crore in its 10-year rule, though the BRS leaders. falsely claimed otherwise. In 2015-16, the two power utilities collected Rs 18,845 crore in power charges from domestic, non-domestic and consumers of other categories.

“Before the BRS government stepped down in 2023-24, the power utilities had made a revenue of Rs 43,439 crore. The burden on consumers was over Rs 24,594 crore. Even if we considered new consumers and increased power consumption, the burden on consumers was over Rs 20,000 crore,” the sources added.

The power charges, the sources said, were consistently increased during the BRS rule from 2014 to 2024. The consumers have been burdened with a five per cent hike on power bills in 2015-16 and eight per cent in 2016-17. The consumers were heavily burdened by 16 per cent with cumulative effect of over Rs 6,000 crore in 2022-23.

“The KCR government cheated consumers by falsely claiming that it had not hiked power charges in the last five years. In reality, it increased the power charges by 50 paise to Rs 1 on each unit, besides imposing the fixed charges, which were not in vogue before 2020. It also increased fixed customer charges, without caring about the protests and agitations by consumers in the state,” the sources explained.

Government sources further said that the previous BRS government always kept the financial economy of the power utilities secret and never revealed their profit and losses. “It resulted in the power utilities landing in thousands of crore losses. It has come to such an extent that the discoms have not submitted their annual revenue aggregates in 2014-15, 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22,” the sources said.

“By covering up the plight of power utilities during their tenure, BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao had predicted that the Congress government would increase power tariff by Rs 18,000 crore.”