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BJP going back on promise over meters: Cong.

By Our Special Correspondent

JAIPUR, FEB.17. The Opposition members in the Rajasthan Assembly today accused the Bharatiya Janata Party Government of going back on its election promise on electronic meters. The party and the Chief Minister should apologize to the people on this count, they demanded.

After coming to power on a promise to replace the electronic meters installed during the Congress regime with traditional electrical meters, the Government was going ahead with the programme of installing the same device to measure consumption of electricity, the Opposition members charged.

The Congress MLA, Harimohan Sharma, who brought up the subject through a special mention in the House said in 13 months the BJP Government had ordered for several lakhs of electronic meters when their manifesto had promised replacement of the existing ones as well. The Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje, and others who had campaigned against the introduction of electronic metres owed an apology to the people, he said.

The charge of the Minister of State for Energy, Rajendra Singh Kheevsar, that the previous Government had installed "inferior quality meters'' and had "looted the public'' provoked the Congress members. The former Energy Minister, Ramnarain Choudhary got up to ask the Minister for a clarification on the charge of "looting the public''. "This Assembly is not your `jagir' (fiefdom) to talk like that,'' he told the Minister.

The Congress members pointed out that a few of the present Ministers like Kirori Lal Meena and Rajendra Rathore had led agitations against electronic meters in their areas.

"This is the case with everyone of you. When you are here(on the treasury side) you speak one thing and when you are there(at the Opposition side) you talk something else,'' Sumitra Singh, the Speaker told the members. The Minister said the present Government was buying better quality electronic meters and the standards of testing them had been upgraded. The Government also had conducted special camps at sub divisional levels for the redress of the complaints the electricity consumers had with defective electronic meters. During the first 100 days of the Government in power 15,273 such complaints were satisfactorily looked into, he informed.

Mr.Kheevsar said the Rajasthan Electricity Regulatory Commission had prescribed a metering code by the end of the year 2003 which made it mandatory to use electronic meters. The State has already purchased 30 lakh electronic meters of which 7 lakhs are of single phase, he informed.

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BJP going back on promise over meters: Cong.

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