Consumers See More Light In Power Sector Privatisation: Survey

The entry of private players in the power sector will lead to improvement in the quality and efficiency of services, a recent country-wide consumer survey reveals.

Most of the consumers are, however, ignorant about the hike in power tariff that such a change will bring, says the survey conducted recently by a national coalition of consumer groups.

The country-wide survey, conducted by the Consumer Coordination Council (CCC) with Friedrich Naumann Stiftung of Germany, indicated widespread dissatisfaction over the basic services provided by state electricity boards.

It revealed that consumers were disgruntled by the lack of proper complaint redressal mechanism, billing related problems and delay in payment of bill due to long queues.

 

The objective of the survey was to get feed back on the existing services and to ascertain the citizens expectations from government which has a monopoly over the electricity distribution, said Bijon Mishra of Consumer Coordination Council.

Nearly 60 per cent of the consumers have received excess billing related problems and about 30 per cent of them suffered disconnection of the supply due to dispute in bill settlement, the survey says.

More than 70 per cent consumers surveyed agreed that consumer groups should be consulted before fixing the electricity rates and 67 per cent were of the opinion that private parties should be encouraged to compete with the government in generation, transmission and distribution of electricity.

The grievance redressal and attitude of the staff were rated as poor or very poor covering all the services. Most of the respondents complained about the breakdown and load-shedding as regular features, though the frequency was more in the eastern and north-eastern zones of the country.

Besides these shortcomings, the survey has also identified factors like massive power theft, lack of any vigilance and rampant corruption in the service has led to inefficiency, CCCs programme officer Santosh Kumar. The survey has also recommended that the power provider should be penalised for faulty meter reading and load shedding, steps should be taken for generation of power from the non-conventional sectors, creation of awareness among consumers regarding energy conservation and a regular feed back from consumers on services.

According to the official forecast by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), the demand for electricity is expected to increase at a rate of eight per cent by the year 2011-12. On the other hand, the demand and supply has further widened during the eighth plan with only 17,000 mw added against envisaged capacity addition of 37,000 mega watts.