Not in favour of hurried privatisation: Sharma

Lucknow: Is the experience in privatisation of power supply in Agra deterring the state government from replicating the experiments across the state?

A comparative study of Torrent Power with Kanpur Electricity Supply Corporation (Kesco) by UPPCL indicates that all is not well with the functioning of the franchise firm for supply in Agra.

Energy minister Shrikant Sharma has been vocal about opposing hurried privatisation of the sector to protect interests of power consumers and UPPCL’s assets and infrastructure. He feels the experiment in Agra has not been successful and there should be no hurry to replicate it.

The Aggregate Technical and Commercial (A,T and C) losses of Torrent in 2019-20 continued to be 18%, while the government-run Kesco has curtailed it to 15%. UPPCL is earning a profit of 4 paisa per unit from Kesco, but while selling power to Torrent, it is registering a 94 paisa loss per unit.

Besides, Kesco has invested Rs 985 crore in the past decade to improve its infrastructure, while Torrent claims to have spent Rs 1,200 crore, but still it has failed to improve the system. Under an agreement with UPPCL, Torrent was to invest only Rs 200 crore in the past 10 years.

President of UP Rajya Upbhokta Parishad Avdhesh Kumar Verma in August had demanded an inquiry into the alleged poor performance by the private company. On his complaint, the energy minister had set up a high-level inquiry under the director, commercial, which by and large found most of the allegation substantive and asked for a third-party audit of Torrent.

However, despite repeated reminders by the minister, neither the third party audit was conducted nor was any action taken.

A senior officer recently transferred from the energy department told TOI that a lobby of officers and engineers at UPPCL has been trying to rush privatisation of discoms without analysing the pros and cons.

Echoing similar sentiments, president of the Parishad has demanded a probe by the CBI to investigate why no third-party audit was conducted into the functioning of Torrent.


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