Mohinder Verma
JAMMU, Feb 26: Notwithstanding the fact that non-metering of connections of various categories of consumers is one of the major factors behind huge revenue-expenditure gap, the Power Development Department has once again failed to meet the deadline of 100% metering of the electricity connections and now seeking the extension of deadline up to the end of 2015-16 financial year. However, the State Electricity Regulatory Commission (SERC) will take final decision on the request only after going through the comprehensive metering plan being submitted by the Power Development Department shortly.
Official sources told EXCELSIOR that as per the provisions of Section 49 of the Jammu and Kashmir State Electricity Act, 2010, no licensee shall supply electricity, after the expiry of two years from the commencement of the Act, except through installation of a correct meter and keeping in view these provisions the SERC had fixed deadline of April 2012 for 100% metering of all sorts of connections across the State.
However, the PDD failed to meet the deadline and on April 25, 2012, the PDD approached the SERC for extension of deadline by at least one year. “Now, the PDD once again feels that it would not be able to meet the deadline of June 30, 2013 fixed by the SERC on April 26, 2012”, sources said, adding “the Department is now contemplating to submit a comprehensive province-wise/circle-wise metering plan to the SERC with the request for extension of deadline for 100% metering of the connections across the State beyond June 2013 up to end of financial year 2015-16”.
“It is a matter of serious concern and puts a question mark on the performance of the Power Development Department, which is already facing huge gap between revenue and expenditure”, sources said while disclosing that at present a total of 5,54,964 domestic connections have been metered across the State and 6,16,893 are yet to be metered. Moreover, 67,191 non-domestic/commercial, 5,599 agriculture and 219 public street lighting are yet to be metered by the department.
Sources said, “the PDD now targets to convert 1/3rd of the existing unmetered consumers (as at the end of financial year 2012-13) to metered connections in 2013-14 financial year. Further, 50% of remaining unmetered connections are targeted to be metered in 2014-15 financial year and balance unmetered connections are targeted to be metered in 2015-16 financial year”.
In response to a question, sources said that during the 2013-14 financial year, the PDD proposes to convert 3,05,599 domestic un-regularized connections to regularized and convert 2,05,631 unmetered connections to metered. Similarly, 1,67,435 un-regularized connections into regularized and 3,58,431 unmetered into metered in 2014-15 financial year and 5,25,865 unmetered into metered in 2015-16 financial year.
Likewise, it proposes to convert 22,397 unmetered non-domestic/commercial connections into metered in 2013-14, 14,931 such connections in 2014-15 and 29,863 in 2015-16 financial year.
About the Transmission and Distribution (T&D) losses, , which are 60% at present and highest in the country, sources said that considering the capital investment being proposed and other measures being carried out to reduce distribution losses, the Power Development Department projects that distribution losses will come down to 50% in 2013-14, 44% in 2014-15 and 40% in 2015-16. However, this indicates that even after three years there would not be considerable decline in the T&D losses.
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