A day after the Delhi Congress president Sheila Dikshit accused the Delhi Government of benefiting power discoms at the cost of consumers, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) challenged the party on Sunday to show a single State governed by it where power tariffs are lower than that of the national Capital.
AAP spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj said the Congress has made a wild allegation against the Aam Aadmi Party Government over electricity pricing in the city. “It is worth noting that these allegations are coming from a party and an individual whose Government hiked power tariffs every single year for fifteen years, against AAP which has successfully prevented tariff hikes for the last 4.5 years, thereby providing the cheapest electricity in the entire country,” he said in a statement.
Bhardwaj further said that not only has Delhi been protected from successive tariff hikes, the Arvind Kejriwal government has also provided a subsidy for the small household consumer that makes it comfortable for Delhi residents to live a dignified life with basic utilities.
“The Congress still has governments in some states. We challenge the Congress to show a single state it has governed where power tariffs and bills are lower than that of Delhi and until then it should refrain from making these silly allegations,” he said.
The Congress had on Saturday alleged that the AAP government has coaxed people living in rented accommodations to install separate power meters, following which the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission increased fixed charges benefitting the discoms.
Addressing a press conference, the Congress party’s Delhi unit president Sheila Dikshit alleged the Arvind Kejriwal government “enacted a drama of installing lakhs of meters to benefit the power companies”. “Electricity bills used to be nominal before. In the name of fixed charges, the government collected crores of rupees and gave it to power discoms,” she alleged.
Elaborating it further, Congress working president and former minister Haroon Yusuf said that in the last one and a half years, the power companies had collected Rs 7401 from the power consumers in Delhi in the name of fixed charges. He said that from 1st April, 2018 to 31st March, 2019, the BYPL had collected Rs 1139 crore in the name of fixed charges, BRPL collected Rs 2096 crores and Tata Power- Delhi Distribution Limited collected Rs 1474 crores from the people of Delhi. “If the fund is calculated at this rate up to 31 July, 2019 an additional amount of Rs 1569 crores would be added and then the amount collected in the name of fixed charges would come to a total of Rs 6278 crore.
He further said that the pension fund is also collected at the rate of 16.3 per cent, which amounts to Rs 1023 crore, thus making the total amount collected unnecessarily from the people of Delhi comes to Rs 7401 crore.
The Congress has demanded the AAP Government not to bill the power consumers for the next six months as the Kejriwal Government had put unnecessary burden on power consumers in an indirect manner to favour the power distribution companies by collecting money in the name of fixed charges and pension funds.