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New hope for honest power consumers

Staff Reporter

Power cuts during anti-theft campaign would be restored in a staggered manner

NEW DELHI: Power distribution company BSES has come out with a detailed follow-up action that has been taken by it to minimise the inconvenience caused to honest consumers during its anti-theft campaign. The Delhi Government on Wednesday announced that as per this plan power cuts would be resorted to in a staggered manner only in areas where Aggregate Technical and Commercial losses were more than 60 per cent. The move comes within a week of Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit pulling up the company saying its functioning required more improvement because at the lower level the responsiveness of the BSES staff to consumer grievances was not efficient. She had stated that BSES had also been resorting to indiscriminate load shedding to check power thefts thereby causing inconvenience to even genuine and honest consumers.

During her meeting with three senior BSES officials last week the Chief Minister had said the company should pull up its socks and come forward with a strategy putting an end to harassment of honest consumers during its campaign against power theft.

BSES Chairman Satish Seth had then assured the Chief Minister that every effort would be made to ensure that a detailed internal management review of the company was done to see that the campaign for checking power thefts does not affect honest consumers. He indicated that the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission had indicated that the AT&C losses must be brought down below 18 per cent in the next three years. As part of the follow-up action BSES has stated that in areas where there is 60 per cent or more load shedding, an intensive campaign against power thieves would be launched along with the elected representatives of the area and the resident welfare associations to encourage people to stop stealing power and apply for legal power connections. Those failing to do so would have to face legal proceedings.

To ensure that honest consumers staying in theft prone areas do not face any difficulty, technical solutions will be found by the BSES to ensure that they are not affected by the power cuts. A campaign would be launched to get the support of the public in identifying power thieves and people would be made aware through an advertising campaign about the criminal offence involved in stealing power and that consequences of detection of theft are huge penalty with imprisonment.

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