Members of the Telangana Electricity Engineers Association (TEEA) have requested the Centre to drop amendments proposed to the Electricity Act, 2003 stating that they are detrimental to the interests not only of the majority sections in the society such as poor, downtrodden, middle class and farmers but also the power distribution companies (Discoms) in States.
In a detailed and point-wise opposition to the proposed amendments, president of the electricity engineers association N. Sivaji said the comments of the association like theirs were important since they were among the key stakeholders of the public sector energy sector and had the experience of ill-effects of privatisation of the sector. Their apprehensions include the reach of electricity to the last person in the society with high subsidy to some sections and the intention of the Centre behind the amendments appears to be safeguarding the interests of private power producers by dumping the State sector.
Stating that privatisation of energy sector was not in the interests of end consumers and employees, he said it was not a great option in a country such as India where price is an important factor in determining the demand. Once privatised, exploitation of the consumer would be easy in the energy sector and the reaction of private sector during the natural calamities was, based on experience in some cities, knee-jerk and laid back against the public sector’s attitude of reacting swiftly during the crisis situations.
He pointed out that experience with privatisation of distribution has so far been very bad with the franchisee/private distribution in Gaya, Samastipur, Bhagalpur, Gwalior, Sagar, Ujjain, Nagpur, Aurangabad, Jalgaon, Ranchi, Jamshedpur and a few other places has been a failure. Besides, most of the policy makers were also aware of the failure of private distribution in Odisha during the late 1990s.