The Yogi Adityanath government is now facing protests in its own backyard over the decision to hand over power distribution to private franchise in five districts.
The opposition parties have already lodged their strong protest against the move and now Bharatiya Janata Party MlAs have also joined the chorus against the privatisation move.
Several BJP legislators and parliamentarians have written letters to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for scrapping the privatisation plan.
In his letter to the Chief Minister, member of Parliament from Mohanlalganj, Kaushal Kishore, said the sole motive of the private companies was to earn profit and they could never replace public sector undertakings and so the government should reconsider its decision on privatisation of power distribution.
The proposal to privatise power distribution in lucknow, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Meerut and Moradabad has so far met with stiff opposition from the power employees, who recently boycotted work and also announced to proceed on a 72-hour work boycott from April 9 if the government did not roll back its decision.
MlAs from Varanasi Ravindra Jaiswal and from Malihabad, Jai Devi, besides several other legislators including Neel Ratan Singh Patel, Surendra Narayan Singh, Rafiq Ansari, Kedar Nath Singh have written letters to the Chief Minister requesting reversal of the Cabinet decision.
The Power Employees’ Joint Action Committee has started a campaign to give memorandum to all people’s representatives in the state seeking their intervention. Convenor of the Joint Action Committee Shailendra Dubey said the campaign had started to bear fruits and even the ruling BJP leaders were supporting their cause against privatisation.
On March 27, an estimated 1,00,000 power employees and engineers, including regular and contractual, had boycott work against the proposal to hand over power distribution to private companies in five cities.
They alleged the privatisation would only benefit a clutch of business houses and industrialists.
During the work boycott, the employees of UP Power Corporation limited and its affiliated distribution companies, did not attend to any maintenance work except emergency services at hospitals and water supply.
During the previous Mayawati regime, power distribution in Agra was handed over to Torrent in 2010. Recently, the Yogi Adityanath Cabinet had approved the proposal to introduce private franchise model for power distribution in five towns.
A similar proposal was also mooted during the previous Akhilesh Yadav regime. However, it was put off after stiff opposition by employees, who feared losing government jobs, although the government has sought to allay such apprehensions.
The state government claimed that Torrent had invested Rs 800 crore in strengthening the power distribution infrastructure in Agra and line losses there had also come down significantly.
Now, the state wants to focus on rural electrification rather than concentrating on the urban areas, especially after the Yogi Adityanath government signed MoU for 24x7 ‘Power for All’ with the Centre, which mandates providing power connection to every household.
