Fuel surcharge adjustment to cost power consumers dear

Parvesh Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 28

Even after the promised relief of 25 paise per unit, residents will have to pay fuel surcharge adjustment (FSA) in the range of 52 to 102 paise per unit.

State power discoms, in their petition filed in the Haryana Electricity Regulator Commission (HERC), have proposed to recover Rs 1,958.26 crore as FSA from various categories of state consumers in the current financial year.

As per the proposal, domestic consumers have been divided into four categories. If the proposal of the discoms is accepted, those who consume 0 to 40 units will have to pay 52 paisa per unit FSA, 41 to 250 units 81 paisa, 251 to 500 units 90 paisa, 501 to 800 unit 102 paisa and above 800 units 102 paisa.

“We have not proposed any tariff hike in our petition and it’s first time ever that we have proposed a relief of 25 paisa to all categories of consumers,” said Nitin Yadav, Managing Director, Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam (UHBVN).

Non-domestic consumers up to 5 KW will have to pay 94 paisa per unit, above 5 KW to 20 KW will be charged 95 paisa per FSA, above 20 KW to 50 KW 102 paisa per unit and consumers above 50 KW will have to pay 104 paisa per unit.

“Since the FSA of many years have been pending, we could not waive off all amount. But we have tried our best to decrease the blow of FSA recovery,” said Yadav.

Officials of the power department said HERC, in its order dated March 19, 2015, had concluded that unrecovered amount of the FSA was Rs 5,066.82 crore by the end of 2013-14, while Rs 1,863.52 crore were recovered from consumers between April 2014 to December 2014, leaving Rs 3,591.52 crore as the net unrecovered amount. After December 2014, the authorities re-estimated the recovery after the conclusion of 2014-15 and the recovery jumped to Rs 2,297.01 crore, while net Rs 3271.33 crore remained as balance of the FSA.

After re-calculating all past and current year amount, on April 1, the authorities said they had concluded that the total outstanding of the FSA was Rs 1,958.26 crore, which they propose to recover from consumers in the current FY.