Rise and rise in power tariff

The power tariff is rising and rising – for one reason or the other – having more than doubled in just about a year’s time. The various ways of fattening the electricity bill on top of the charges based on actual power consumption come in the form of ‘adjustment’, ‘quarterly adjustment’ and ‘fuel adjustments’, apart from unexplained ‘surcharge’ and ‘additional surcharge’ as well as hordes of other taxes like ‘electricity duty’, ‘sales tax’, ‘income tax’ and ‘TVL fee’. We were once even paying for the construction of Neelum Jhelum hydropower project.

But the irony is that the already hard-up consumers even have to pay for the inefficiency and non-performance of power distribution companies i.e. their inability to recover dues from power thieves. To them the only way out of the long persisting power theft nuisance is to shift the burden of the unaccounted-for units of electricity to honest consumers – those that have been paying their bills regularly. This non-recovery of the bills is accumulating in the form of circular debt that has not assumed monstrous proportions at a staggering amount of Rs2.31 trillion as of June 2023.

Even worse, now the distribution companies are asking Nepra, the regulator, to charge consumers for a decline in electricity consumption. During a public hearing last week presided over by the Nepra chairman, Discos have sought over Rs85 billion in recovery from consumers as capacity charges (at Rs4.5 per unit) to account for decline in power consumption during the second quarter of the ongoing fiscal year. There is need for the power regulator to hold the distribution companies accountable instead of succumbing to their unfair demand and passing on the burden to poor consumers, as is always the case.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 26^th, 2024.

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