UPPCL explores legal ways to recover arrears

LUCKNOW: Power defaulters have come to haunt the Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (UPPCL) in a big way with most of them having due arrears exceeding Rs 25 lakh. On Saturday, the corporation decided to approach the department of law for setting up a separate bench for cases pertaining to big power defaulters.
Over 500 such cases are already pending with the high court for years with a combined dues estimated to be mounting over Rs 500 crore.The total pending arrears due towards UPPCL are around Rs 15,000 crore. Chairman, UPPCL, Navneet Sehgal said that the corporation will be pursuing such cases in a more comprehensive approach, so that the dues can be recovered. "For this special monitoring of such cases will be done through dedicated software, besides approaching the law department to initiate the procedure for setting up a dedicated bench for such cases,” he said.
The corporation had in 2010 too initiated a move to recover such dues pending with the power defaulters. Sehgal in the February 16, 2010 circular dashed off to all managing directors of distribution companies categorically mentioned a figure of Rs 527.85 crore trapped in such cases.
The list of defaulters was also sent to the discoms head, instructing them to "to get in touch with the respective defaulters individually and settle the issue.” But as apparent, even after a year, there has not been much improvement on the front with the corporation still facing the same revenue crunch. Meanwhile, officials of the distribution division of UPPCL have also been asked to assure that the one time settlement (OTS) scheme will be pushed into exhaustive application in a bid to settle more and more power arrears. Notably, the UPPCL has been rolling the OTS scheme repeatedly for the past two years. However, much to UPPCL’s embarrassment even that did not yielded much fruit.