Punjab cabinet approves unbundling of state electricity board

After much dilly dallying, the Punjab cabinet finally approved the restructuring of Punjab State Electricity Board (PSEB) as a part of power sector reforms in compliance with the requirements of the Central Electricity Act, 2003 to make it more efficient, accountable and responsive to consumer needs.

Disclosing this here today, the Chief Secretary SC Agrawal said that the restructuring of PSEB would now result into two separate companies, Punjab State Power Corporation Ltd (Powercom) to manage generation and distribution and another Punjab State Transmission Corporation Ltd (Transco) to manage transmission functions. Both these companies would be fully owned and managed by the state government.

An exercise of minimum restructuring had been done to meet the requirements of the Act with the formation of Transco with the strength of 3,500 employees and Powercom having the rest of the employees around 65,000. He added restructuring of PSEB would not be a privatisation in any manner as there would be no private shares in these companies. Apart from this, the chairman-cum-MD and directors of the companies would be appointed by the state government.

After restructuring, the companies would have clean balance sheets as their assets would be unencumbered which would enable them to avail of more funds from banks and financial institutions to ensure better supply and services to the consumers. The subsidy to farmers would not be affected in any way and not lead to higher electricity bills after the restructuring. Likewise, the power subsidy to BPL and SC families would also remain unaffected. The chief secretary further said that there would be no change in the service conditions of the employees as they would continue to get the existing benefits including, pension, gratuity, leave encashment, dearness allowance and annual increment etc.