Cesc To Carve Region-Specific Units

Rama Prasad Goenka-controlled power utility CESC Ltd will undertake a major organisational restructuring to reduce its internal bureaucracy and provide better service to its huge consumer base. As part of its recast, CESC will be split into various empowered strategic business units (SBUs), each of which will cater to specific regions within Calcutta.

The restructuring is expected to ensure greater accountability for technical and pilferage losses, resulting in greater cost control and savings. The restructuring is going to be a major systemic change for CESC. In the long term, it would lead to enormous benefits, CESC managing director Sumantra Banerjee told Business Standard yesterday.

CESCs present organisational structure has remained unchanged for decades. The area covered by the power utility is broadly broken into six broad zones, with a commercial and a technical executive handling the commercial and technical functions, respectively. These executives send their recommendations to the head office, in which most of the decision-making authority is vested.

Under the new structure, there would be greater delegation of power. The regions would also have legal and industrial relations people, Banerjee said.

Senior officials will be put in charge of each regional unit and empowered to take decisions on the spot. The SBUs will receive a measured supply of power and will be accountable for:

l Power received versus power sold (accountability for technical and pilferage losses).

l Number of connections and speed of new connections.

l Number of breakdowns and quality/speed of breakdown service.

l Consumer convenience services like the number of cash offices, processing time at cash offices, prompt attendance to telephone calls, and prompt redressal of billing complaints and meter reading errors.

Unscrambling/metering of the feeder lines to each region to monitor the power being fed is already on and CESC hopes to have all the regional SBUs operational by end-1998.

CESC made a quiet beginning on this front on an experimental basis in the Howrah region in August-September 1997, and has been encouraged by the experience. In three months, over 2.2 million units of unbilled power have been detected.

CESC's transmission and distribution losses stood at 18.90 per cent for 1996-97. The company has managed to reduce these losses to 17.50 per cent for the period between April 1997 and January 1998.Plans are now afoot at CESC to get the north region and south-west region units operational as strategic business units by March-April.