TDP State president K. Kala Venkat Rao on Monday said it was unfortunate that the government has burdened the people by hiking power bills at a time when they were reeling under the coronavirus crisis.

In a statement, he termed the decision to fix the category of power consumption by taking average of March and April “illogical.’’ For a lower middle class family, the bill used to come to ₹100 per month, including user charges, but now it had shot up to ₹ 600 per month.

The government should have bifurcated the units consumed in two months and decided the slab.When all other States were coming to the rescue of people, the A.P. government was burdening them with inflated bills, he said.

The YSRCP, which promised that it would not hike power tariff if voted to power, had revised it two times in a year, he pointed out.

‘Reverse the decision’

Mr. Venkat Rao demanded that the government issue fresh bills by considering meter readings for the previous two months separately so as to rationalise slab rates. It was the government’s failure not to issue manual bills last month for which people were being punished, he said.

The TDP leader said the previous government had brought out the power sector from the red. There was a deficit of 22.5 million units when Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated in 2014. The residual State could overcome the power deficit in five years of TDP rule.