‘Farmers to get 7-hr power supply at night’

JAIPUR: The Vasundhara Raje government will begin supply of electricity for minimum six-and-a-half hours in the day and seven hours in the night in four phases to farmers from Tuesday. By June-July, the government has promised to provide 24-hour electricity to villages in the state.
Energy minister Gajendra Singh Khinwsar made the announcements at a press conference here on Monday.“We will have to purchase additional power to supply 7-hour electricity to farmers. The government has decided to bear an expenditure of Rs 300 crore for this,” minister Khinvsar told reporters. “Some of our villages are getting, on an average, around 20-hour electricity. We will make changes in the existing system and start supplying 24-hour electricity supply to all the villages by June-July next year,” he promised.
The state government would introduce a three-tier monitoring system to ensure regular supply of electricity for the promised hours. “We will monitor it at the Discom level, public representatives’ level and the state government level,” Khinwsar said.
The minister said the new government would do the monitoring in a ‘reverse manner’. “Instead of tracking for how many hours the electricity was supplied, the officials will now have to maintain record of the number of hours for which there was electricity in a village,” Khinwsar said. “The department will seek reasons for non-supply and fix responsibility of the officer concerned. The report will then be sent to the chief minister’s office,” he stressed.
In another relief to farmers, the Raje government has decided to reduce power tariff from Rs 2.10 per unit to 90 paise per unit for farmers having electricity connections for drip/sprinkler irrigations. “Previous Congress government had excluded drip/sprinkler farmers from special category. Our government will restart it and bear an additional cost of Rs 131 crore for it,” the minister said.
There are 1.47 lakh applications pending for electricity connections under the “Mukhya Mantri Sabke Liye Vidyut Yojana”. “The 37,000 who have already deposited the demand money, will be granted connections immediately. For the remaining, demand letters would be sent from January 2014,” Khinwsar said.
The government would also be taking steps to curb supply losses and power thefts “In 2008, the power companies were under a loss of Rs 15,000 crore. This has increased in past five years to Rs 71,000 crore in December 2013. We will check supply losses, thefts and improve monitoring to reduce the revenue loss,” the minister said.